Pensions Consultancy Jobs

PrimeCareers is the leading actuarial recruitment website, providing the largest selection of pensions consultancy, general insurance and life assurance jobs in the UK and world-wide.

Being an Actuary
The role of a pensions actuary is to provide organisations with actuarial advice regarding employee benefits and particularly pension schemes. Pension consultancy is now the largest employing sector of actuaries in the UK.

Pension Advice
Pension consultancy work involves all aspects of designing and amending pension plans including final salary and money purchase schemes.

Scheme Actuaries provide advice on funding pension schemes and a Scheme Actuary will compare the value of a scheme’s assets with its liabilities. They also calculate transfer values for defined benefit (‘Final Salary’) and defined contribution (‘Money Purchase’) schemes.

Actuarial advice will also be required when schemes are closed and need to be wound up. Again, when employees get divorced, companies are obliged under UK law to determine an equitable division of pension between spouses.

Actuaries not only advise on pensions but also employee benefits. This covers how employers pay and reward their staff, including staff working overseas.

Qualifications and Defining Issues
Pension consultancy firms tend to have stringent academic requirements, particularly the larger and more elite firms. Because of the need to develop client relationships, strong inter personal skills are also highly sought after. Pension consultancy firms tend to offer better salaries than their life office counterparts.

FRS 17
This is a new accounting guideline that is having a huge impact on the future provision of pensions. Essentially, rather than placing an ‘actuarial’ value on assets and liabilities based on long-term assumptions, this standard forces companies to value on a market basis