Beyond the actuarial box: Building an adaptable career

More than 200 young actuaries gathered across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra — in person and online — for the first Young Actuaries Programme Career Series event of 2026. The evening brought together a practical workshop and a panel discussion featuring four practitioners who have taken very different paths through the profession.

The focus was not on technical skills, but on the capabilities, habits and self-awareness that shape a career over the long term. If you missed the session, here is what the room was talking about.

What skills gaps should young actuaries address first?

Actuarial education specialist Jenifer Walton facilitated the workshop, opening with a deceptively simple exercise. Where are you now, where do you want to be by the end of the year and what is the distance between the two?

Walton organised the landscape into three skill domains. Core technical skills cover the actuarial fundamentals required to qualify. Advanced technical skills — including actuarial judgement, strategic thinking and project management — distinguish a practitioner from a leader. Soft skills, the hardest to measure and often the last to develop, are what ultimately determine whether that leadership role materialises.

"Communication, stakeholder management and people leadership are not extras. They are core requirements of the role."

Participants were asked to set SMART goals across all three domains and critically, to commit to a next step within a fortnight. A learning plan without momentum is just good intentions.

What the panel wished they had known earlier

Four practitioners took questions from the floor, offering perspectives shaped by decades of experience across insurance, risk management, reinsurance and recruitment.

Kriti Khullar, Risk Insights Lead at IAG, made the case for building advocates — people who speak well of you when you are not in the room.

"You have to earn them," Khullar said. "Introduce yourself, sign up for things beyond your day job and look for ways to add value to others. When you are going for a role, an advocate can make the difference."

Jason Yu, AVP and Senior Risk Manager at Swiss Re, pointed to feedback as one of the most underused tools among early-career practitioners.

Bianka Grange, Executive Manager at VERO SME Packages and former Co-Chair of the Institute's Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, offered the panel's sharpest challenge to conventional career thinking.

"Doing the right things, leaning into your strengths, getting things right — that trajectory is not the flex you think it is. The things that shaped my career were the things that were hard, that felt uncomfortable. Seek those opportunities out, sit with the discomfort, and use it to inform the next decisions you make," Grange said.

Adrian Karloci, Director at B&K Consulting and an actuarial recruiter, kept his advice grounded in relationships. Whatever stage you are at, find someone who has already walked the path and invest in that connection.

"It can't all be good stuff, because then you're not going to grow. Find someone you respect who has done what you want to do and get close to them. It will really help with your development," Karloci said.

The feedback that sticks

Both Khullar and Grange shared moments when feedback shifted the trajectory of their careers.

Khullar recalled feeling overwhelmed during a particularly pressured period — managing BAU work alongside merger and acquisition activity — and venting to a senior manager about the volume of demands on her time. The response reframed her perspective: think of your expertise as a deck of cards. Someone may only need one card — five minutes of your time — and that helps them move forward.

"Get out a card and help. Don't be all or nothing," Khullar said.

Grange described a mentor pulling her aside after a meeting and telling her directly that she was speaking a completely different language to the underwriters in the room — and that no one was connecting.

What should young actuaries know about AI?

Grange identified the core technical skill as problem-solving design — the ability to clearly articulate what you are trying to solve, what information you have and why the approach you have chosen is the right one. That clarity, she argued, will matter most as AI becomes more embedded in actuarial work.

"A lot of the times technical teams struggle to articulate what problem they are actually trying to solve and why their approach is going to answer it. That skill becomes even more important when you are working with AI," Grange said.

Karloci's advice was direct: experiment with AI and understand how it applies to your work, but keep your attention on the fundamentals.

Yu raised a specific concern for early-career members: the risk of over-relying on AI before developing the judgement to evaluate what it produces.

"When we started using AI, we had the knowledge to verify what it was giving us — to say, that looks right, or that's a hallucination. If you haven't gone through the foundational learning first, that judgement isn't there yet. Going through the traditional ways of learning is still important, because that's what gives you the human judgement to act as a guardrail," Yu said.

What career skills don't appear in actuarial textbooks?

The session closed with a rapid-fire question: what skill do you use every day that never appeared in a textbook?

• Grange: "Do something hard every day, do something that scares you every day. It can be tiny — make a phone call you've been putting off. Just do it. You'll build confidence and the capacity to sit with discomfort."
• Yu: "Meditation. Ten minutes — silence, total darkness. It gives you a completely different perspective when you come back to a problem."
• Khullar: "Look after yourself. Our profession has a tendency towards overwork. Make space — whether that's a walk, a class or whatever works for you. You won't perform at your best if you're running on empty."
• Karloci: "Trust your instincts. And commit to consistent, small steps forward. Consistency compounds."

The 2026 Career Series is just getting started

The next session — The Communication Gap: When Being Right Isn't Enough — is on 14 May 2026. It is built around a single, familiar problem: you have done the analysis, the numbers are sound, and the room nods and moves on. This session is designed to close that gap.

Expect a live demonstration, small group work on a real-world scenario, and a practical framework you can use in your next stakeholder conversation. Available in person in Sydney, with watch parties in Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Adelaide, or join virtually. In-person attendance earns 4 CPD points; virtual 2 CPD points.

Visit the What's on page to find out more and register.