How can mentoring help your career?

Why is mentoring important?

Many senior actuaries would agree that a mentor can greatly help your actuarial career. Whether you are in a corporate role, a consulting role or working in a wider field, mentors can be valuable sounding boards and share their experiences to help you navigate your career.

In our recent webinar, I asked Iain Bulcraig and Varun Sundar to share their reflections as a mentor and mentee who have been working together in a mentoring relationship for over a year.

Read on to hear their reflections on how mentoring has helped their careers…

What are the benefits for mentors?

Iain enjoys the opportunity to become a trusted companion on someone’s career and life journey. “It's a really warm feeling to see someone develop and to value your opinion over that time.”, says Iain. He shared a story about how he mentored a colleague who was struggling to pass her final exam. They met every week and she passed the exam. While she put in the work to pass, Iain described how good it felt to have been able to help her.

Iain has also learned a lot from mentoring. Mentoring actuaries who work in different fields, at different career stages, and with different genders and ethnicities, have helped Iain understand different challenges. “Some of my mentees have been dealing with different situations that I would never come across.”, tells Iain.

What are the benefits for mentees?

Varun has found having a mentor outside work has helped him to understand his team and organisation better. Varun says it can be “good to have an independent sounding board who can sort of demystify a lot of things from your perspective”. Talking to your mentor can help you to understand how your boss thinks.

Describing a mentor as an “encyclopaedia of experience”, Varun talked through career options like working overseas with Iain. “It's kind of like having like a playbook with you that you can just open it up and be like, Oh, I want to do this, he’s already done it, how do you do it?”, says Varun.

Iain and Varun both shared stories of how actuaries have found new jobs through their mentoring networks, showing some very tangible and short-term benefits of mentoring.

How did you start a mentoring relationship?

Varun: I attended the webinar last year and Iain had spoken about mentoring. I actually reached out to Julia initially and at the time she didn't have any capacity for additional mentees so she warmly introduced me to Iain and we kicked it off from there. Iain was very good in that he was very proactive, he was very welcoming and approachable and he set up the first few mentoring sessions that we had, it really made me feel welcome.

How does a mentor make the decision to take on a mentee?

Iain: I counted how many mentees I currently had, probably about five or six now. I probably had two less than that a year and a half ago. And so I sort of thought, do I have capacity for some? And I guess the point was, a lot of my mentees are quite senior now, it would be interesting to re-engage with some people at the earlier part of their career journey, and yeah it's nice to be asked.

In some ways, you feel it's a lot, but it's only one hour every quarter and my role right now gives me that flexibility and time to make that time.

You have that initial conversation and you're not expecting everything to click straight away but you want to get a feel for the person, why they want a mentor. If it's phrases like, you know, “My boss told me to get one”, then maybe you're thinking this isn't necessarily going to work long term. If it's people talking about needing to develop, having someone to externalise ideas…that probably sets the scene a little bit around what are they wanting.

Should your mentor be another actuary?

Iain: I think if someone is thinking through, do they want to be an AA or advising or working with a direct partner consultancy, then an actuary can certainly give you advice around how far you can deviate to still be on the same kind of path you wanted.

But if I ever thought of going into a role, say in terms of large operational roles or senior claims role or something with lots of people, I would probably go and chat to someone who's done that kind of thing. I'd be happy to get, you know, to get advice from someone who wasn't an actuary if they were doing that role.

How can you find a mentor who is a good match?

Iain: The most common ways I've seen is either as I say someone leaves a company or moves company and there's a chance to maintain a relationship with someone in a different place, which is good. Or you speak to your manager and you say I really want a mentor, you must know a bunch of people in the industry, you must have someone who you can have a conversation with your manager around who do they know outside of the company that may be able to help out. Some other ones have started where I know someone put their hand up with management said, “Yeah, I want to mentor, who can you set me up with? Who can you make me meet? Who do you might you know that might help them?”. If it's someone who's been in the industry for a few years, they should know a bunch of people.

Has being a mentee inspired you to become a mentor?

Varun: I think it has, And I mean, even long before getting a mentor. I think the broader actuarial profession is one that is very forward-giving in that you sort of give to those who are coming after you and you don't really expect too much in return. So I've always wanted to pay forward what I've received. It's definitely something I would love to do.

Do mentors have mentors?

Iain: It's funny, I don't really have a mentor but I've probably had a couple of really senior people at various different stages who I have talked to around the next step.

There's an ex-Financial Controller who, when I arrived in Australia 20 years ago, he decided it was his job to teach me how to become an Aussie bloke. In life and in work and everything else. And still to this day he tries to do that. So I have people that give me advice that I can occasionally listen to and occasionally not listen to.

I reported at one stage to an amazing woman called Megan Beer who's very senior at Resolution [Life] now. I was probably mid to late 20s, and I watched her in action in boards, and she was fantastic. She could talk technical, she could talk high level, she could communicate really quickly with the board.

I was like, how do you do that? I said to her, “Should I go and work for a consultant?”. She said, “I've never done it”. And we talked through the pros and cons a little bit. And I did, I went to work for consultants there. It wasn't necessarily the best time in my life in terms of the work-life balance, but I certainly got an interesting learning experience from it and learned some skills that I wouldn't have got otherwise. So, you know, that's a fairly short-term mentorship thing from her.

How do you make sure mentoring is a two-way street?

Varun: One thing I definitely focus on is just trying to build a good relationship with Iain.

There are a couple of easy and quick things that Iain might pick my brain on. He's like “How's the data science course going?”, as it wasn't around when he was studying. And I'm telling him about what I'm studying, if it's good, what I think about it. So I guess he gets to stay up to date with the newer career paths and education programs and so forth.

You want to make them look forward to the catch-up, and I guess from perhaps Iain's perspective, he wants to be looking back in a few years' time and be like, “Oh yeah, I was able to help Varun achieve a few of his goals”. So I'd say just work on that people aspect, focus on just having a good relationship.

If Iain is able to see that I’m receptive to his feedback and I'm able to implement that well, I'm sure he gets a little bit of satisfaction out of that as well. In terms of tangible advice, I'm never gonna be able to tell Iain, “Do this and you'll be a better CRO”. Like that's never gonna work. But I think if I can focus on the people aspect, that'll probably be something that Iain would find rewarding.

It's kind of a two-way street, but you're not necessarily giving back to the person who gave to you, right? You can always give to someone else. And I find that a lot of times when you seek a mentor, and they're very generous with their time and their resources, they aren’t really expecting anything back from you directly, but they probably expect implicitly that you'd be able to develop into someone who can help another person. And I'm sure that they would appreciate if you helped someone else when you have that capacity and that sort of experience behind you. So that's sort of like my mindset that I'm taking with it.

Should you pick a mentor who is similar to you?

Iain: It's interesting the idea, Julia, whether you have a mentor who is going through the same kind of things that you go through or different kind of things in terms of things like gender, ethnicity and that kind of thing. It's interesting that sometimes it's good to get advice from someone who's had to go through it. And sometimes it's good to get advice from someone who hasn't who's from the outside looking in and maybe you need one of each.

I mean the challenges of maternity leave is not something that many men have to go through. It's probably getting better, but it's still a challenge of how do you re-engage with work after that time.

Similarly, the challenges around diversity in a team where you're the only person of a particular gender or particular ethnicity is really hard sometimes. So I think there's no harm, if it's not working out, suggesting that they seek out other people to help with things. There's also no harm in sometimes saying like “I'm not sure I can help you as much as you need right now or perhaps you should get something else as well”.

How do you prepare for a mentoring session?

Varun: The first time Iain and I met, I had done a bit of bio research to understand what he's doing and where he's at in his career. You don't want to be unimpressive when you're meeting a CRO for the first time. So it can be a little bit intimidating, but I think to Iain's credit, after we had a couple of catch-ups, I would prepare a few questions that, or like challenges that I would have encountered, since our last meeting, and I'd be mulling about those things.

And then I'd be like, “OK, how am I going to bring this up with Iain?” I might have a little bit of a think beforehand, but I don't really do any hard preparation as such.

What I found that is to Iain's credit, he's very approachable, friendly and I find that his values resonate a lot with mine. So I feel like I can just go to him and have an open and honest conversation. And I get advice that makes sense.

How do you end a mentoring relationship?

Iain: If either the mentee is not getting much out of it or the mentors are feeling like not much is changing, or not much has really been listened to, then you probably tend to just say “That's okay, it's not quite right, you don't need me at the stage. If you do down the track, you know, you can always come back.

They tend to fade rather than, they tend not to be dramatic, you know, storm out the end of a meeting kind of thing.

If you've gone six months without contacting someone, and neither of you really cared about it, then you probably know it's not high on either of your priorities. But I think the frequency can change. So if you’ve been mentoring someone for almost 10 years, you can easily go six to twelve months without talking. You can still re-engage and that sort of thing. It's more of the startup phase where, if after a year or so, with say four or five meetings of that time, and it's not really working out. You probably have a bit of a conversation and say, look, you may not need my help. And you can always suggest it's good to get different advice or a range of advice. And that way, you know, they may tap into someone else.

Conclusion

Mentoring is a very individual experience that can have benefits for both mentors and mentees. Some mentoring relationships a short-term or situation-specific, and others can be longer-term arrangements. Building trust, having open communication and making sure the relationship is mutually beneficial are some keys to a successful mentoring arrangement.

Featuring

Iain Bulcraig, SCOR Global Life Australia, Chief Risk Officer

Iain is Chief Risk Officer at SCOR Australia having previously had a 2-year secondment in Paris within SCOR reinsurance, supporting its IFRS 17 implementation. In total, Iain has over 25 years of life insurance experience across consulting, insurance and reinsurance firms, both in Australia and his native Scotland. Until his European secondment, Iain was the CFO for SCOR Australia/NZ and has been involved in Institute committees for many years.

Iain also focuses strongly on people-initiatives, especially mentoring of other actuaries and he is a qualified Ethics teacher, bringing this learning to primary school children each week.

Varun Sundar, Actuary, RAA

Varun is a general insurance pricing actuary with over 7 years’ of experience. His current role involves delivering technical and demand reviews, assisting with monthly roll-forward valuations, and other smaller stakeholder responsibilities that keep the business ticking along. Varun’s past roles include working with government and a large multi-line insurer.

In his free time, Varun likes to have quiet weekends with family and friends and is trying to explore a bit more of South Australia since moving to Adelaide in 2021.