Essay by Tia Goss Sawhney

This invited essay has been submitted to the Actuary of the Future Section of the Society of Actuaries for publication in the November "Actuary of the Future" newsletter. In this essay I express the concern that actuaries are losing control of the analysis of insurance risk and numbers to other professional disciplines, disciplines who have mastered technical skills that we have all but ignored, and that unless we upgrade our technical skills, our domain and employment prospects will steadily shrink.

I describe two skills sets where we are particularly vulnerable: databases and predictive modeling.