While some recruiters for the insurance industry say they’ve seen a slowdown in job openings over the past couple months, highly technical positions – such as actuaries or skilled underwriters – are still in demand.
A quick glance at job postings shows that for whatever other job openings might have dried up, actuarial job candidates still have plenty of places to send a resume, and will often be compensated well once they get in the door.
That’s because those highly technical positions occupy the proverbial high ground in times like these, said Lou Sinks, a partner with Boston-based hiring firm Aminex. Sinks has noticed a slowdown in demand for other types of insurance jobs in just the past couple months, but the technical job openings are continuing apace.
D.W. Simpson, a major actuarial recruitment firm, lists more than 50 openings for property/casualty, life, annuities and investment actuaries in the northeast region alone as of Oct. 17. Entry-level actuaries who have finished four of their professional exams can command salaries of up to $70,000, according to D.W. Simpson’s compensation listings.
“Actuaries are about as recession-proof as the industry gets,” said Margaret Resce Milkint, managing partner for Jacobson, an insurance staffing firm.
Actuaries get the luxury of a job that’s always in demand, but they also tend to get eye-catching hiring incentives, including high salaries. The current economic troubles won’t put any of that in danger, she says. In 20 years in the industry, Milkint has never seen any company scale back perks for those employees – even if they have to seriously trim other personnel costs – and she said it won’t happen this time, either.
Other types of number-crunchers are in a relatively good position as well, Robert Half International reported in a financial services outlook released last week. Corporate accountants’ salaries will rise from 2 percent to 5 percent for 2009 across all levels of company financial professionals. The only financial services group with noticeably lower expectations are those involved in mortgage transactions – they’ll be seeing a less-than 1 percent increase in average salary next year.
Bill Driscoll, president of Robert Half’s New England District, said the rough economy has made some employees hesitate to aggressively pursue a bigger and better job, but that those jobs are out there. Company management wants to keep an eye on the bottom line, Driscoll said, while they try to be more efficient during difficult times.
While it might sound like actuaries and other number-crunchers have a pretty sweet deal, recruitment firms say there’s a flipside to the high ground – more is demanded of these types of professionals than before.
Both Milkint and Sinks said actuaries and other technical employees are often expected to have some of those “soft skills” – not just handy with a balance sheet, but able to make presentations and communicate, essentially be the kind of “people person” that’s the opposite of what’s generally expected. The stereotype of the anti-social actuary, silently working all day over a calculator, is no longer the norm.
“A geek just doesn’t cut it,” Sinks said.
