Actuarial - Life Insurance Review

10am-4pm Daily 5 days a week. This is the core programme and each hour is scheduled with breaks. Before lunch was generally training sessions or opportunities to ask questions from Partners of the company. Full of learning about the company as well as specific service lines and sub-service lines. Also worked on a case study in a group with other interns in the same department. This was in preparation for a presentation towards the end of the experience. Apart from these there were also other learning sessions very specific to life insurance Actuarial, as well as shadowing of high-level meetings which was very fun.

Definitely developed my confidence in speaking in meetings and asking questions. Through the learning/coaching sessions provided by EY I developed my resilience, worked on building my personal brand, developed my understanding of emotional intelligence and how to improve it, and also developed skills in liaising with clients. This is all on top of learning the importance of being open and honest with others, sharing knowledge and being part of a very supportive and inspirational team.

There were plenty of opportunities to ask questions, and even though I did not really have any questions to ask initially, I found myself thinking of things which I would like to know more about and really expanding my knowledge. I already had an idea of what Actuarial roles entail but I definitely got a deeper insight into the specifics of the differences between what Life insurance or General insurance or Pensions Actuarial work may entail. There is plenty of opportunity to find out about the different service lines, Tax, Consulting, Assurance, Strategy, Tech, Actuarial and it is not uncommon to switch.

The company culture was not only friendly, where if you ask someone a question they will be very polite to respond to you and give you the information, it was very engaging and caring. By this I mean that I never had to seek attention from someone to contact them and find things out, despite being virtual many members from the Edinburgh office reached out to me to welcome me and make sure I was settling in well, despite no-one asking them to and in spite the fact they were very busy. I cannot stress enough how much of a positive culture the company has, with everyone having time to join various societies to expand their understanding of social issues. You find many non-LGBTQ+ employees being part of the LGBTQ+ Network, many people joining any of the societies in the Ethnic network despite not being of that ethnicity, just wishing to educate themselves and act as what EY terms as an Ally. Best company culture, superior to others in the Big 4.

It has to be said that the virtual experience was not as good as an in-person experience could have been. Having said that, despite this it was a very engaging and interesting experience. There was plenty of opportunity to find out about any area you are more interested in. I most enjoyed my one-to-one meeting with a partner when he was prepping me in advance of a meeting in which I would shadow him. Despite being so high up in the hierarchy, I never felt that in the meeting and he was never patronizing in explaining even the most simple terms to me. Absolutely no knowledge is expected and no question is a stupid question.

Yes

This is definitely a cliche but be yourself. What I mean by that is EY hires people, not the knowledge you may have. EY sells people, not products, this is what gives the company value. They want to see that you are capable of being the absolutely best teammate. Just as I talked that everyone is so helpful, it is also expected that you will be like this. The recruitment is strengths based, which means you need to think about what you are good at. Just to say if youre going for Actuarial you need to stress you are good at communicating complex concepts in a simple way, you are analytical and like problem solving and fairly good at maths. For consulting similar but maybe you dont need to be that good at maths.