Abstract:

Professional competences play a key role in Actuarial education in general and, consequently, is a major concern of the study program of the Master’s Degree in Actuarial Science at the Universidad de Málaga. In addition, the identification and acquisition of these type of skills by our students face some difficulties due to the fact that the actuary profession is little known in Spain. For these reasons, we consider of great interest designing and implementing actions that help the contextualization and acquisition of professional competences in the actuarial field in a university degree like the Master’s Degree in Actuarial Science at the Universidad de Málaga.

In this article we describe the main features and first results of a two-year project on innovative teaching methods carried out in the mentioned study program at the Universidad de Málaga. The project proposes several action lines, which require the participation of students, lecturers, actuaries and related professionals. Firstly, joint sessions are held by actuaries, lecturers and students in order to identify the main professional competences required by the labour market in this field, with a special focus on the newest ones and those that need updating or adaptation to new technologies, emerging needs of this market and new sector trends. The results of these interactions between all players involved feed several pedagogical actions, like providing topics for final dissertations, new background and challenges for assignments, collaborative projects and simulation models used in the courses, contributing with an up-to-date context for the development of professional competences.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that putting into practice these planned actions require the coordinated participation of lecturers of different courses, since most of the involved competences are multidisciplinary.

Keywords:

Actuarial education, professional skills, transversality.