We Don’t Refer to Years Now: It’s Pre-COVID or Post-COVID
By Tamara Wilt
Small Talk, August 2022
When the pandemic hit the U.S. in March 2020, work life certainly changed for most of us. For me and the other 17 percent [1] of the U.S. population who worked from home at the beginning of 2020, we thought everything stayed the same (phew!) I had a Prophet conversion contracted to end in December 2020, and all the actuaries helping me with it worked remotely too. By the time we finished our project, the election was over, and it was 2021. The rest of the world had been getting up to speed on working remotely for a year by then.
As I took on new projects, I noticed a shift in the new, global, virtual world. Most impactful was the reduced request for travel. Pre-COVID, I always met new clients in person before commencing work. I would fly out to their location to work for a short period of time or just to have lunch. If the client was local enough, I would drive to their office once or twice a week for lunch meetings and just to “show my face” in the office. Now, we meet on video chat. Recently, I even did an interview for a side-gig tutoring exams, where I literally made a video of myself answering the questions from the website. No more heavy card stock resume paper needed!
Post-COVID, I have been invited to work on smaller projects. Video conferencing (such as Zoom and Teams) coupled with firewall security and file-sharing technology has made it easier to “hand over” work. Pre-COVID, a project under three months in length would not be worth the client or the consultant’s time due to the infrastructure that would need to be built to pass this work back and forth, as most large companies did not have a system yet for onboarding virtual workers and setting up their workspaces. Now, I am invited to complete projects as small as three to six weeks or even on an ad-hoc basis.
Software platforms have changed. Pre-COVID, most actuarial software I used was installed locally on my PC. In other words, it ran fast and didn’t need Wi-Fi. Two years later, my laptop is usually accessing 1) a virtual desktop, which is 2) accessing a cloud-based server where the software is housed. The snail’s pace at which this system operates brings me back, way back. I can almost hear the dial up tone of my modem connecting to AOL.
Post-COVID, I am invited to more meetings. So many more, fivefold at least. Pre-COVID, my voice playing over the triangular shaped box in the middle of the conference room table for an extra billable hour did not seem essential. As the familiarity of video-conferencing tools grew, I started being invited to all sorts of virtual meetings: onboarding meetings, status meetings, training sessions, marketing meetings, you name it. Seeing my face while I laughed or the ability to share screens or, even better, to take control of another actuary’s screen added value. Viewing documents over a screen-share is much nicer than huddling around someone’s computer or dragging your laptop to a conference room to hook up to a projector.
Pre-COVID, my company, clients and colleagues only used video conferencing when necessary for screen-share—anything that needed more visualization than a screenshot in an email. Everything else was covered in an email or a phone call. But now, video-conferencing is used for so much more— human connection. Work-from-home consultants and remote full-time actuaries now get to reap the benefits of connecting face to face with clients and other actuaries, wherever they are located.
With everyone up to speed virtually—nationally and globally—email never sleeps. Prior to COVID, I felt the cadence of the in-office work schedule, with quiet mornings, supper times and weekends. Saturday was my time to get work done. With mobile apps allowing many actions such as screen shots, attachments and file share, it is easier to respond immediately with no computer login needed, creating a constant flow of back-and-forth communication.
26 months after the country was shut down for COVID-19, 44 percent1 of workers work remotely at least five days per week. For small business, this provides an opportunity to aggressively cut operating costs such as building rent and infrastructure. “In office” challenges aside, small business still faces other management challenges. The top five management challenges small businesses still face, post-COVID:
- Workload Management: in other words, “biting off more than you can chew.” Managing client expectations and staying in touch with their needs allows small businesses to gauge project size and time frame.
- Resource Management: keeping everyone busy and having available workforce needed when committing to a project. By staying connected to other actuaries at all times, knowing their skillsets and goals, small consulting firms are able to reach out to fellow actuaries for help as their workload ebbs and flows.
- Downtime Management: getting less urgent projects and projects placed on the back burner completed, continuing education, marketing, recruiting, accounting, web-site building, etc. Sometimes small business owners wear lots of hats when starting their business!
- Breadth versus Depth: smaller insurance companies by definition operate with smaller staffs and thus require resources to have more breadth which necessitates accessing expertise for depth. Having the right mix of experienced and analyst level actuaries is crucial for small companies and consulting firms.
- Project Prioritization: operating in a limited resource world requires focus on high priority projects. Staying in touch with clients to understand the priority of projects is important.
Further complicating these challenges is the growing actuarial supply and demand imbalance. As the actuarial profession competes with alternative and dare we say “sexier” career paths as well as the Great Retirement (many more older workers than expected retired during the pandemic), the supply of actuarial resources is being choked off at both the entry and more experienced levels. Greg Heidrich, Executive Director for the Society of Actuaries, may have expressed the pipeline challenge best:
“For a long time, actuary was the preferred profession among those with strong quantitative backgrounds, but some have observed that actuaries have been losing ground to data scientists. Many insurers’ data science teams are growing rapidly and taking on tasks that sometimes overlap actuarial work. Today, college students increasingly view data science as an attractive career option for those with quant backgrounds.”[2]
While the supply of actuaries has been decreasing, the demand has only intensified as products continue to evolve. Increased interest rate guarantees, more complex benefits, and the current economic environment continues to be challenging with low interest rates and market volatility. Perhaps the most significant source of increasing demand for actuarial resources has been the regulatory environment, most notably Long Duration Targeted Improvements (LDTI) for GAAP accounting, Principles Based Reserves (PBR), and IFRS 17.
As the world, and in turn, the actuarial community recovers from COVID, smaller insurance companies will certainly have nuanced opportunities and challenges. Our client relationships have been strengthened through the increased use of virtual technology, and the trend towards Actuarial Process Outsourcing (APO) is expected to continue as a solution to the growing actuarial supply and demand imbalance. Furthermore, APO allows smaller insurance companies to access broader and deeper capabilities than they maintain in house.
The author would like to acknowledge Marc Altschull for his involvement in writing this article.
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual author and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the editors, or the respective author’s employer.
Tamara Wilt, ASA, MAAA, is a life actuarial consultant, and president of Actuarial Guidepoint, LLC. She can be reached at actuarial.guidepoint.llc@outlook.com.