If you have less than 3 years experience, you probably would often be asked to do routine tasks or occasional independent research projects. All of these tasks would be either supervised or guided by fellowship actuaries in a big firm.
Depend on your level below, how do you understand the big picture of what your team try to accomplish while maintain attention to detail?
For example, if you have programming experience to clean data faster than people use Excel only, then you should have plenty of time to identify specific issues and understand the importance of your work and peers at your level.
However the big picture of what actuaries, directors, and VPs discussed would rarely be shared with these levels analysts.
How do you take initiative to learn the big picture of your department besides your own work's contribution when your bosses are too busy to explain details to you?
For a 0-1 year experience analyst, you might get assigned a lot of manual tasks, such as manually collect data from different sources include competitors information. Most of these tasks could not be automated with programming so actuaries created these jobs for entry levels.
For a 1-2 year experience analyst, you might get grab what entry levels did and organize data in reports that the fellowship actuary or even directors would be able to use and present to VPs and higher. Maybe some smart entry levels already did your work. You might also be asked to do more complicated data crunching in other software than Excel and update some models' data depend on actuaries' needs.
For a 2-3 year experience analyst, you should have enough experience to handle most of data collection and crunching tasks except very complicated data that handled by IT or fellowship actuaries. You might be asked to participate in revising some models' factors with your insight and recommend changes to actuaries. If entry levels had questions about routine tasks in Excel, you would be the first aid, and then actuaries (for complicated problems).
Depend on your level below, how do you understand the big picture of what your team try to accomplish while maintain attention to detail?
For example, if you have programming experience to clean data faster than people use Excel only, then you should have plenty of time to identify specific issues and understand the importance of your work and peers at your level.
However the big picture of what actuaries, directors, and VPs discussed would rarely be shared with these levels analysts.
How do you take initiative to learn the big picture of your department besides your own work's contribution when your bosses are too busy to explain details to you?
For a 0-1 year experience analyst, you might get assigned a lot of manual tasks, such as manually collect data from different sources include competitors information. Most of these tasks could not be automated with programming so actuaries created these jobs for entry levels.
For a 1-2 year experience analyst, you might get grab what entry levels did and organize data in reports that the fellowship actuary or even directors would be able to use and present to VPs and higher. Maybe some smart entry levels already did your work. You might also be asked to do more complicated data crunching in other software than Excel and update some models' data depend on actuaries' needs.
For a 2-3 year experience analyst, you should have enough experience to handle most of data collection and crunching tasks except very complicated data that handled by IT or fellowship actuaries. You might be asked to participate in revising some models' factors with your insight and recommend changes to actuaries. If entry levels had questions about routine tasks in Excel, you would be the first aid, and then actuaries (for complicated problems).
How do you balance between attention to detail and big picture?