One year anniversary, wondering what others did in their first year...

[emsti]

I just completed my first year of actuarial work at a small to mid-sized health insurance company and I was curious if my experiences were in the norm.

I spent the majority of my time entering data for our pricing model and also learned how to program in SAS and VBA. I also helped and was supervised while generating some standard and ad hoc reports. Once I had learned enough of SAS to not hurt myself too bad I was allowed to maintain and adjust some of the programs that were used by our team. There is no rotation available as the department is not so big that I can get swapped around and not so small that I have to be "multilingual" out of necessity.

I want to make sure that I am getting the most from my position as it feels more menial than I expected. I have been contemplating a switch of venue to a less top-heavy actuarial environment (most of the department actuaries are FSA's) in hopes that it would be a better environment for professional development/advancement.

[Irish Blues]

The first year is all about learning: you're learning things you'll need to be productive in your job going forward. Ideally you've also stepped forward and become someone that your managers feel comfortable going to when things need to be done; if not, then it should happen in your second year.

So if you've learned and learned and learned and you feel like if your supervisor came to you and said, "Hey - I need this done, can you handle it?" that you could indeed handle it, I'd say you've done good for your first year.