 Hi everyone it's MJ and in this video I thought let's do an update on the actuarial exams because I have made a previous video about it but that's when the exams were called something different and also we have had quite a not a big like as in content has changed but quite a bit of a restructuring on where that content is tested so there's been quite a bit of changes with regards to the examinations. Now how actuarial science works is there is an international actuarial association and this is a global organization that kind of sets the actuarial education standards so they're like this is what we need to know then each actuarial society or institute or whatever you want to call it in each of the various countries they will then take that syllabus and say okay let's now design our own one for our own country maybe flavor it towards our own regulations and our own economic climate because actuaries we're very much focused on you know local stuff and you need account for local regulations and local tax practices and all those kind of things so that said and done I'm going to go through the South African exams now the South African exams are quite similar to to the English and I know the Indian exams also quite similar to the English as well as the Australians the Americans are a little bit different so just bear that in mind depending on where you're watching this from you might just need to factor that in but what is nice is this is on the actuarial society of South Africa's website and you can actually see all the different stages as well as the various exams so right at the at the beginning we've got these A1 subjects and basically why we have A and F is A stands for an associate member so these all the A exams is what you need to do if you want to become an associate act tree and then the F exams are if you want to become a fellow act tree and a fellow act tree is just an act tree who has specialized in an area and that's the difference between them and an associate so an associate and fellow all of us will do these these A exams and I guess your foundational technical exams are actuarial statistics, business economics and business finance and actuarial statistics I do have a whole course on Udemy 13 hours I think called it mathematical statistics that you can go check out if you want to start your actuarial journey although like I said I'm going to be saying in an upcoming video is that if you want to start the actuarial exams it's very very important that you have a solid maths background and I've also got a Udemy course that just goes over the foundational mathematical topics so again all links will be in the description so yeah you basically want to be good at maths and then you can start the actuarial exam so we've got actuarial statistics, business economics and then business finance then we move on to the intermediate technical subjects and this is where things start getting a little bit more difficult we've got financial mathematics interestingly just to note in England they combine financial mathematics and contingencies into one exam which is weird because in the old system these two were kept separate so the South Africans decided to keep them separate but yeah we've got financial mathematics then we've got risk modeling and survival analysis and there's also an R component to this exam this is a very difficult one contingencies is like calculating when people are going to die mortality tables kind of very I guess you could call it the most actuarial of all the subjects and then you have financial engineering and loss reserving and this one is also very very tricky when it comes to the mathematics stochastic calculus here is is a nightmare and I've also got courses on Udemy for financial mathematics financial engineering risk modeling as well a little bit and then my youtube channel has got contingencies so you can go check those out although they're probably horribly outdated I mean I was making them back in what 2014 that's like seven years ago gosh okay core principles actuarial risk management this is the notorious CA1 exam this one is an absolute beast this is what has probably the highest failure rate this causes nightmares and actuarial students around the world very very difficult because essentially you're taking all of these subjects in the like that you would have to you know choose one to specialize in so risk management finance investment retirement and related benefits general insurance life insurance health care principles all of these things are examinable in this exam when I did it was over three days you wrote you got a day off and then you wrote again it was absolutely insane now I do have a course on Udemy called the actuarial collection which shows my my old study videos so I wouldn't call it necessary a course that you could you know it's not like a formal course you'll see the videos are very weird very different but they were my video study notes that I used to help myself just remember the vast amounts of things basically almost everything in the financial industry regulations benefits insurance it's it's an absolute monster of an exam but like I said we got a Udemy course called the actuarial science collection it's got that in a couple of other videos that yeah I think there I think there's 46 videos videos for this the subject absolutely insane then we've got the fellowship principles so what happens here is you choose two out of the six so you now financial enterprise risk management is the the latest one to be added and if you're coming from England what was happening in the past is general insurance is split into two so you either be a pricing act tree or a reserving act tree in South Africa we kind of combine the two so this is a monster exam and then finance and investments again we've kind of combined the two so I think in England you had it as one is just finance and one is just on investments and that is just because there's so much content to know that even though you're specializing in it sometimes it makes sense to split these subjects into even more specialist areas but these exams are really really difficult you choose two if you want to become a fellow this is what you're specializing in some universities they have this but a lot of the time you're writing this after you've got your degree so this is more of a postgraduate course and then once you've done two you will pick one out of the two in which you will do your fellowship so you can't do your fellowship in health if you haven't done the specialist subject in health and what we can see is South Africa has been the first to introduce the banking act tree and this is kind of like the fellowship version of enterprise risk management so enterprise risk management over here which is one of the courses that I teach we spend a lot of time on credit risk and building credit models and all these kind of things and that's very very useful for banks so this kind of just takes it one step further to look at the institution and how a banking organization works and says okay cool how can an act tree assist in this area so very very cool the ones I did so yeah I wrote finance investments and enterprise risk management and then I did my fellowship in finance investment applications and I always thought I knew finance so well I mean well I think everybody thinks they know finance so well because we've been playing with money our whole lives and then only passed this exam on my third attempt because yeah there's there's definitely a lot I think to each of these topics and especially sometimes what happens is you know you pass the sectorial risk management exam so you think you then know all of these subjects really well because you've written this monster exam on them but the fellowship shows you that there is still a lot of depth to still go in so countless hours of reading and studying and exam practice these fellowship exams oh they do they take quite a bit of time to to pass so like I said for me failed it twice got another third attempt so in total it was three three years so it's almost like the same amount of time it took me to pass like all the intermediate and all the technical subjects same amount of time that you need to get into the fellowship then what will happen is there's a few other things as well so if you do the F106 Enterprise Risk Management exam and you then do this course called the C100 Enterprise Risk Management course you then enter a global profession so you then become a chartered enterprise risk actuary and this is something that it's a global profession where with these other ones here you become a FASA which is a Fellow of the Actuarial Society of South Africa so it's a local profession and then if you write F106 you then enter the global profession there is then a whole bunch of and I see they've got the certificate of banking practices I think that is something that attaches to the fellowship one for banking I didn't do the banking fellowship so I'm not entirely sure what that is but I think it would be similar to this chartered enterprise risk actuary then your exams are not done yet they are still all these things known as normative skills this is where you see the most difference between all the various actuarial societies so I don't spend too much time here the big one to note is the communication exam so this is an exam that you have to write there's also an exam that you have to write on model documentation then there's sometimes some pop quizzes like what I mean like that it's like a 20 mark multiple choice and that could be on the law in your current area or on a whole variety of different things you'll then also go to a few conferences where you will learn about there's the foundational actuarial professional practice which is if you want to become an associate and then if you want to become a fellow there's the fellowship actuarial professional practice where you're talking more about ethics and higher order things and philosophy and and those lovely things so but like I said this this tends to change quite a bit and these things are very much specific to the region but essentially you do have these core subjects that everybody does and then you have your specialist subjects where you choose which ones you want to do and yeah that is the actuarial exam structure in 2021 but make sure to go to your own local society to see how they have structured it it should be fairly similar they of course they'll just give it different codes and different names and maybe a slight change here and there but that essentially is the actuarial exams in 2021