2 Introduction

People analytics (PA) has existed in one form or another for many years. However, unlike many other fields, there isn’t a traditional or standard route into it. Experts from many different fields have hacked, stumbled or forced their way into PA. In my short time doing this, I have not encountered anyone from the actuarial field bringing their unique blend of business, risk and statistical skills to PA.

At many points in university and during the first half of my career, I found myself questioning whether actuarial work was right for me. As someone who loved working with numbers and stats, the field should have been a perfect fit but something was always missing. At some point, between trying to figure out if the capital that needed to be held by the business should be 300m or 310m and if the splines I used when calculating a yield curve were accurate, I realised that there must be more impactful way to use the skills I’d spent 13 years mastering. That’s how I, like many of you, stumbled into PA.

The PA community is one of the most open and helpful that I’ve ever seen. Regardless of how experienced and knowledgeable they are, the industry leaders tend to have an open door policy and are eager to contribute to the shared knowledge of the field. While I am just a humble technician, I am hoping that this free resource will help people add a different way to approach PA problems. Chapters 3 to 6 are intended to be a gentle introduction to actuarial concepts and the ways actuaries approach problems. Thereafter, the remaining chapters are intended to showcase how these methods can be applied to people analytics. I also hope to continue to build on it as the field grows and as new ideas and approaches are introduced. You may also find examples of bad actuarial humour in this book. I hope this does not deter you from reading it.

I’ve assumed that the reader has a good foundation in statistics and is familiar with commonly used statistical and mathematical terminology. In the future, I may add further chapters to give an introduction to the relevant fields.