Every year we host a ‘Mini Actuarial Academy’ for those who are interested in learning more about an actuarial career. The academy is run for one week every summer from our central London offices*, and offers an introduction to some key actuarial concepts and an insight into the different types of work an actuary could be involved in.
What’s in it for you?
At APR, we are well known for the quality of training we provide to our actuarial staff. The academy offers a glimpse into this through a week of interactive workshops and training sessions hosted by our actuarial employees. These sessions cover a variety of topics across the different actuarial sectors (life insurance, general insurance, and pensions), introducing some typical actuarial problems and techniques through hands-on exercises and model-building. Examples of work covered in past academies include:
- Building cashflow projection models in Excel, to value typical life insurance products.
- General insurance pricing techniques.
- Building from scratch a stochastic model to simulate stock market returns and find the expected cost of investment guarantees.
In addition, during the week you will meet some of our senior actuarial staff and partners, giving you the opportunity to ask questions about their career paths and experiences as an actuary. We also organise a social evening during the week to meet more of the APR team.
As well as helping to establish whether the type of work is of sufficient interest to them, the academy will benefit attendees by discussing the good practices that an actuarial student will adopt in their work, which will stand them in good stead in any future graduate actuarial jobs or interviews. Feedback from past interns has been very positive, as can be seen below in the testimonials from past attendees.
Who should apply
The academy is brief, but intensive, and relies on engaged attendees with intellectual curiosity and an eagerness to learn. It is designed to cater for people of different ages, and we welcome all to apply, but we generally expect the majority of applicants to be in their first couple of years of university.
We do not expect attendees to have any prior actuarial or other knowledge – indeed successful applicants are provided with Excel material in advance of the academy to help provide a suitable knowledge base for the week and ensure they we can get as much out of it as possible – and you do not need to be studying a mathematical subject. However, a numerical background may be useful for some sessions.
Application Process
In order to help us decide who to offer a place on the academy, we ask candidates to complete a short application process, which involves:
- Candidate contacts APR (details below) to register their interest in the academy.
- We reply with details of the information required (CV and cover letter) and a few short application questions to complete.
- Applications reviewed and a shortlist of candidates invited for an informal telephone ‘interview’ to discuss the week and motivations for applying with a member of the APR team, before we finalise our group of attendees for the year.
If you are interested in an actuarial career, you should also consider finding out more about our graduate associate and actuarial analyst schemes.
How to apply
Applications are now open for our 2022 academy, which will be held from Monday 1 August to Friday 5 August 2022.
Following two successful years of hosting our academy remotely, with all session taking place via video calls, we have decided to continue this in 2022 so you can take part no matter where you are based. We hope to also be able to offer the option of attending at least some of the academy in person in our London office, but a decision will be made on this nearer the time. We will keep all candidates informed throughout the application process.
Although there is no specific application deadline, we encourage you to apply early since spaces on our academy are limited and we make offers on an ongoing basis.