Actuary explores aligning skills with employer needs

And then there are skills that the insurance industry is looking for.

For up-and-coming women in insurance, a rapidly approaching panel could be just what they need to ensure their skills are on track.

“What’s the market looking for in terms of skills, what’s the market valuing?” asked Adrienne Ostroff (pictured), CEO and founder, Athena Actuarial Consulting, who will be taking part in the “Fireside Chat: Accelerating Your Career – The Latest Scoop on Skills” at the Women in Insurance Summit at the W Chicago City Center Hotel on May 11.

For her, the pandemic was a hard stop, and an unscheduled time for people to take stock.

“Maybe we had a wake-up call that you end up completely burned out after 20 years of not thinking about that fulfillment element,” she said. “You don’t want to look around and realize that ‘really, this is not the type of work that I really enjoy doing in the first place’.”

When your skills and the employer’s needs align, that’s great for everyone.

On one hand there are skills that you want to maintain, and on another there are skills that “are getting the energy, and which are draining me.” Are the skills that are required by your employer draining you? If so, “I need a different employer, just get myself into a different arrangement, with the skills that I have and want to build.”

“People want to follow their passions and feel fulfilled,” she said. “There’s still that room for development.”

Questions and answers

Ostroff is looking forward to attending the event and hearing what people have to say during the question and answer session, especially the “harder questions, our event (attendees) bringing their own experiences. I feel like that’s the direction a lot of these sessions will take up,” with stories of like: “My employer wants to keep doing this. And, I just don’t really believe that’s as useful a skill. What do I do?”

This is not her first time in front of a crowd.

“I’ve spoken at a couple of young leaders’ conferences, and I was one of the co-founders of a women’s organization,” she said.

She has also spoken at actuarial conferences too, since she is an actuary herself, so “sometimes it will be a more technical panel, or this mix of skills, assessing skills, maybe technical skills, but in a context of a leadership question,” she said.

New connections

She is quick to point out that “I love Chicago,” and that “I’m really excited about this event.”

The conference comes at an interesting time in her career, having started her own actuary company.

The work she does there “obviously interacts with insurance. It’s very much insurance-based, but it’s not the typical community that I am either asked to speak with or invited to a conference for. And I think because the actuarial work that we do is a very different side of insurance than people typically think about. So I’m really excited to connect with this community of women in insurance.”

She added that it will be a good chance to see other leading women who are “working, contributing to the insurance industry from a different side than I typically see. I’m most excited about connecting.”

To register for the upcoming conference, please click on: https://events.bizzabo.com/women-in-insurance-ch-2023