Abstract:

Identifying and developing professional skills is one of the main challenges in actuarial education. The actuarial profession is hardly known by students enrolled in postgraduate programs in countries like Spain, where the actuarial profession is mostly unknown by the general population. However, in order to deliver a high-quality education, this component should play a key role in the curriculum design as well as in the learning approach. Therefore, identifying the core set of professional skills that define what an actuary does is an essential feature of the study programs that cannot be neglected, and even more those that differentiate the actuary from another professionals, especially high-order skills.

In this paper, the main results of a project on pedagogical innovation we are carrying out in the MSc Program in Actuarial Science at the Universidad de Málaga are described. Our project is focused on identifying and developing these professional skills, through activities that involve the participation of actuaries. By means of their valuable contribution and experiences, both students and lecturers learn not only what are the professional required skills, but also how to acquire and apply them. Moreover, with this approach, the learning experience is also enriched with an always-updated vision of the profession.

All the activities have been designed with a clear professional emphasis, in a varied range of formats, which include workshops that allow a direct interaction between students, professionals and lecturers; proposing professional reports on hot actuarial topics, which should be the basis of some students’ final dissertations; and designing digital models for risk assessment with the advice of invited actuaries. In all cases, collaborative work and innovation are encouraged.

Finally, it is also worth noting that our approach is also based on a holistic view of the set of skills that students are required to develop. This fact implies that in most cases the activities of our project are implemented jointly in more than one course, thus demanding a high degree of coordination between lecturers.

Keywords:

Actuarial education, professional skills, postgraduate program.