"Who needs an actuary"? Almost everyone, it turns out

How often has one come across this profession? Many people who have heard of it associate it only with insurance. That is an incomplete picture. An actuary assesses the cost of a policy or pension promise, but the same skills can help organisations make decisions when the future is uncertain.

Across the economy, businesses and public institutions commit resources today without knowing precisely what tomorrow will bring. The profession's ability to quantify long-term risks belongs in more of those decisions, including those far beyond its traditional employers.

Consider Frank Chang, Past President of Casualty Actuarial Society and Vice President of Applied Science at Uber. His move into technology shows how expertise developed in pricing and reserving can serve a different industry. He says, “We are a lot more careful when jumping to conclusions,” explaining that financial and business context helps turn analysis into decisions. After seven years in conventional roles, he took an opportunity at Google that opened a new path.

Nalen Naidoo, CEO of Property24 and President of Actuarial Society of South Africa, applies similar thinking to a digital marketplace. Pricing there depends on assumptions, scenarios and the ability to distinguish signal from noise in consumer behaviour data. He describes a discipline that considers stakeholders, responds to feedback and exercises professional judgement. For him, experience with innovation projects while working in financial services became the bridge to media and technology.

In India, Ajay Shekhar, Chief Operating Officer at IDEAL Fastener India Pvt Ltd, has taken his training into manufacturing. “Risks come in many dimensions, not just financial,” he says. His early career at Ford Motor Company included credit and motor-side projects across departments, which helped him see the business as a whole. He later chose roles where he could make a clear difference.

These moves share a principle: the value of this training lies in the problems it helps solve, rather than in a particular job title. We learn to test assumptions, weigh possible outcomes and consider consequences over time. Those habits can help a hospital plan capacity, a manufacturer assess supply risks or a regulator evaluate long-term obligations. A model used to allocate resources should remain fair, explicable and stable as conditions change. That longer view can prevent an attractive immediate result from obscuring costs that emerge years later.

How can more professionals make the move? First, make our contributions understandable outside the profession. Explain the business result of an analysis, not merely the technical method or examination passed. Second, volunteer for a visible project in another function. Naidoo's innovation assignment gave him a reason to build new skills and learn how decisions were made beyond financial services.

The transition also calls for unlearning. Established roles often reward precision and a robust evidence base. Other settings sometimes require a timely decision with incomplete information, followed by revision as new evidence arrives. Collaboration matters as much as technical confidence. Shekhar recalls that adjusting to the zipper industry and its specialised teams “was a battle against myself for the first few years.” The experience made him more receptive to other people's ideas.

Chang points to another adjustment: taking responsibility for whether an analysis actually helps its users. It is easy to deliver a model and leave another team to deal with the quality of the inputs or the decision that follows. We must understand both the source of the information and the needs of the people acting on it. Naidoo likewise had to become comfortable weighing trade-offs before every uncertainty was resolved.

India has a particular reason to widen the profession's reach. Social protection for informal workers, expanding health coverage, stronger financial regulation and climate risk all involve commitments whose consequences unfold over years. Ministries, hospitals, technology firms and manufacturers can benefit from people trained to reason through those obligations. They may need to test the affordability of a scheme, changing demand for care or the cost of exposure to climate events. The point is to combine careful measurement with sound judgement in practice. Yet career expectations and the public image of the field still point heavily toward insurance and pensions.

Those sectors will remain major employers. The larger opportunity is to recognise actuarial training as preparation for a type of problem: how to commit resources today against an uncertain tomorrow. The next generation should carry that perspective into any industry where it can improve a decision. It is time both the profession and the country made room for them.

By Preeti Chandrashekar (Immediate Past President, Institute of Actuaries of India)