Society of Actuaries - 2003 Archived Yearbook

profession must also aggressively implement a promotional strategy to attract new entrants to the field and
provide support to current candidates.
Image
In a similar vein, the image of actuaries needs refurbishing while maintaining the high esteem of actuaries’
unique knowledge, analytical skill sets, ethical standards, and public trust. Public awareness of actuaries
needs to be increased.
The SOA and the profession need to ensure that the public sees actuaries as dynamic professionals, capable
of providing valuable guidance in addressing a broad range of financial and business issues involving
contingent events.
The SOA and the profession must also change business and government leaders’ perceptions as well. There
are diverse and profound problems facing business and government to which actuaries could apply their art
and science if only given the opportunity—credit quality, health care financing, health care access, energy/
power shortages, etc.
Specifically it is time to develop and implement a promotional strategy for addressing the way actuaries are
viewed by society at large. In addition, efforts need to be made to promote risk management as a career with
broad opportunities for new entrants from a variety of undergraduate fields.
Regulation
Businesses supported by actuaries are experiencing regulatory changes, and actuaries should have an
increased role in interpreting and determining regulation.
Current actuarial statutory roles are important to the credibility of the profession in the public eye and must
be maintained and developed while the profession strives for greater influence in the formation of public
policy and the various government regulations.
The SOA and other organizations will proactively identify public policy and regulatory issues where the
profession can provide guidance and determine how to promote the profession to increase awareness of this
capability. Then, actuaries and actuarial organizations must begin to offer potential solutions to the
regulators and policy makers.
Societal Issues/Demographics
Governmental and other policy makers around the world face extremely difficult problems that must be
addressed, such as retirement security, health care funding, public health, housing, energy, starvation,
overpopulation, etc.
Specifically, consider the impact of demographic changes, combined with regulatory shifts, upon the practice
of actuarial science in pensions and retirement benefits. Private insurers and pension funds face potentially
ruinous consequences in 20 years if they make bad decisions today.
For many of these issues, a lot of analysis has been done, but there are not adequate resources to solve the
problems. In other cases, there is not consensus. One example is the very different ways of thinking about
social security reform.
Actuaries have skills and abilities that can contribute to these discussions and to making sound policy on all
of these fronts. The profession will increase its involvement in establishing public policy regarding social
issues and the benefits of various ways of addressing those issues. A first step in that direction could be to