Ethics is the foundation of professionalism. Ethical behaviour is not just about creating better outcomes but it is also about creating a market where those outcomes can be appropriately rewarded. It is about behaviour that is good for the professional, their employer, their clients, and for society at large.
In today’s competitive commercial world, everybody is looking for an edge and it can easily be forgotten that the best route to success is to become a professional of worth and value. The aim of this course is to give you a sound theoretical basis and a practical wherewithal to become the professional you want to become.

Organised by the EAA – European Actuarial Academy GmbH in cooperation with the Society of Actuaries in Ireland

The web session is suited to those in leadership positions or those aspiring towards leadership positions, being based on leadership rather than follower ethics. It is designed for actuaries, recognising the professional and ethical challenges that actuaries face, but is also relevant for other professionals, with much of the practical examples being useful to a general audience.

Technical requirements
Please check with your IT department if your firewall and computer settings support online participations (the programme Zoom is used for the web session). Please also make sure that you are joining the online session with a stable internet connection.

The Professionalism Plus course is about augmenting your professionalism skills to enhance both your self-interest and your capacity to create win-win outcomes from your professional interactions.

The course is a mixture of theory and practical examples with an optional additional practical assignment at the end of Day 1. The practical examples will cover techniques to help with problem solving, making difficult decisions, managing risk and improving your communication skills.

After the course, attendees will have an improved wherewithal to assess character, develop their own character, resolve ethical dilemmas and more generally, to act prudently and responsibly in their interest and in the interests of others.

The course is designed to complement the very technically driven actuarial education to aid attainment of a more rounded general real world wherewithal. Actuarial education is very rational and very much inside the box. It can leave gaps in terms of aiding the full development of an actuary’s interpersonal and commercial wherewithal, including a wherewithal to consider the public interest, a key professional requirement in most actuarial associations. For example, the course will draw out a wherewithal regarding whistleblowing that can be essential because if such an issue arises, an actuary can appear stuck between a rock and a hard place, if they blow the whistle, they can face significant personal hardship, whilst if they fail to blow the whistle, they can face professional sanction.

Over the two days of the course, the following topics will be addressed
- Self care and mental health, including the impact of Covid19
- Techniques to aid decision making
- Professional ethics and conflicts of interest
- Regulation of professionals, including AAE requirements
- Character assessment / development / interaction
- Managing issues of discrimination and harassment in the workplace
- Whistleblowing
- Persuasion theory and influencing skills
- Emotional intelligence
- Managing brutish behaviour and unhealthy work environments
- Data ethics and ethical AI
- Leadership skills
- Realpolitik - power dynamics and power struggles
- Change management - making changes when change is difficult

The language of the web session will be English.

Colm Fitzgerald FSAI FIA
Colm Fitzgerald is an Assistant Professor in Actuarial Science in University College Dublin, where he lectures on professionalism and ethics, amongst other subjects. He has presented on professionalism topics at several actuarial conferences, including the EAA Data Science & Data Ethics conference, the Virtual Colloquium of the IAA and the Annual Convention of the Society of Actuaries in Ireland (SAI). He has run ethics webinars for ActEx in the US, delivered in-house ethics education for actuaries in a commercial consultancy, and has run CPD professionalism skills training sessions for the SAI. He has a history of being an active volunteer in the actuarial profession. He is currently the Institute & Faculty of Actuaries’ (IFoA) representative on the Education Committee of the AAE. Previously he was a member the Education Board of the IFoA and has held various other education roles in the IFoA over the last 12 years. One of his main areas of research is in character development and he launched a character development website in 2020 (www.knowyourselftest.com).