Actuaries have different duties depending on whether they work for insurance or financial services companies. Those who work for insurance companies answer questions about future risk. They do this by calculating the odds that certain events will happen. For example, they calculate the likelihood that a driver will get in an accident. Actuaries consider the drivers age, gender, type of car, and past driving experience.
Actuaries calculate the odds of other events as well.
These include death, sickness, injury, and property loss. The reason for calculating these odds is that the insurance company must take in enough money to cover the claims they pay out. This price must be profitable and yet be low enough to compete with other insurance companies. Thus actuaries calculate how much insurance should cost. Most actuaries specialize in life and health insurance or property and casualty.