Interesting but hasn't been my experience. I find that actuaries going into DS are what you'd naively expect. They know the stuff that's tested on the exams but have underdeveloped DS skills compared to other quantitative types at the same career stage, especially in coding. I would definitely not describe them as strong in business acumen.
Anecdotally, most of the people I’ve known who’ve switched out of actuarial to data science haven’t been the best.
In most cases it’s been people who couldn’t pass exams, or were missold on what actuarial work actually involves and ended up moving early in their career when they wouldn’t have strong business acumen at all.
The one person who made the switch who I would consider a good actuary went back and did a masters in data science and applied for entry level roles. He had a couple million in the bank and decided he could afford to start over again.
He’s doing well now, he’s in a relatively senior position at a tech company. Financially he’s worse off than he would have been if he continued down the actuarial path, but he enjoys data science work a lot more than his old job and isn’t limited to insurance/pensions/finance.
