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Chairperson’s Corner

By Chris Smith

Actuary of the Future, March 2025

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Hello, Actuaries of the Future!

By the time you receive this newsletter, spring should hopefully be well underway or darn close—at least that’s what Punxsutawney Phil foretold yesterday when he emerged from his hidey-hole and saw his shadow.

Winter is often thought of as a time for sequestering and relaxation, but here at the Actuary of the Future Section, your council has been hard at work developing plans and content for the upcoming year. There’s a lot afoot this year—not only within our section, but within the Society of Actuaries more broadly as planning around the transition to Communities begins. As such, I thought it’d be a good use of my column in this edition of the newsletter to catch you up on the outcomes of our Annual Planning Meeting, which took place a few weeks ago in New York City.

If you haven’t yet heard, the SOA board adopted a new strategic plan for the next three years. We started the meeting with an update on this plan as it was presented during the Leadership Summit last October in order to level-set on the organization’s new direction, with the ultimate goal being to successfully set the stage for a discussion around how we can work in that direction. Luckily, a few of these new strategic pillars—“Optimize the Candidate Pipeline” and “Leverage AI”—dovetail quite nicely with plans that we already had underway!

Next, we took stock of our wins in 2024—of which there were many. We delivered two webcasts, seven podcast episodes, five newsletters, four “Hot Topics” digest emails, and several sessions and in-person networking opportunities at the major SOA meetings. Needless to say, 2024 was a busy year! This reflection helped us understand where we were successful and where there was room to grow; with that said, we’d love to hear feedback from you as well, so please connect with us and share your thoughts on the Actuary of the Future Section LinkedIn group.

After all that, we closed out with a discussion of our plans for 2025—the most exciting part! As a bit of a sneak peek at what we’re working on, keep an eye out for:

  • More networking opportunities: We’ll be launching a two-pronged effort to provide more in-person networking opportunities in partnership with local actuarial clubs and virtual events to bring our distributed membership together.
  • More content targeted to all phases of the career journey: During the meeting, we identified that while we’ve done a great job delivering for those exploring the career and for early-career actuaries, there is an opportunity to focus on providing more content for the “missing middle” (near- and recently-minted ASA’s), as well as to provide thoughtful materials for transitioning to the next stage of your career—whatever that may be.
  • Better advocacy: We recognize the role that we have to advocate for our ~3,700 members around the world, and take that seriously. We’ll be working both within the SOA and externally to ensure that organizations, employers and leaders in the actuarial space are all working with the actuaries of the future in mind.

Like I said—exciting, right? I truly can’t wait to see what we achieve this year, and look forward to a successful integration into the Career Development Community where we can continue to build on these aims. I’ll lean on this column in subsequent issues to keep you apprised of our progress periodically, but another goal we set out is to use our LinkedIn group more frequently—so stay tuned there as well. Lastly, if you ever want to connect, feel free to reach out to me personally on LinkedIn as well!

Thanks for your support!

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the newsletter editors, or the respective authors’ employers.

Chris Smith, ASA, MAAA, chair, Actuary of the Future Section Council. Chris can be contacted at christopher.smith3@mercer.com.