Last week I officially finished working on the Forecasting team and have begun work at part of the External Reporting team. My time has been divided between the two roles. Spending time explaining to others how the Forecasting spreadsheets are created, and getting to know my way around the models and spreadsheets that I will be using as part of my new role.

This involves comparing the results from different Prophet runs and accounting for any differences.

My first exam is in 6 days, so study is taking over my life at the moment. I'm taking Contingencies, Economics and Financial Economics which are proving to be very tough to get my head around, but finger's crossed they are coming together in time for the exams!

This week I've spent my time testing the affects of different expense assumptions on profits. This has involved making changes to the current models held on Prophet and creating new runs. As I haven't had much past experience doing this sort of work, there's been a steep learning curve.

As the Actuarial exams are coming up I've also been taking study afternoons. I'm looking forward to a week's holiday next week so that I can relax for the last time before exams descend!

I work on the Forecasting team and our role is to predict where we think the company is headed. Our work is used to identify any areas of the business that might cause problems in the future and to suggest action to avoid these problems. Our predicted profits are also integral to calculating the staff bonuses so it's interesting to keep track of how that's going.

Since joining HBOS in April this year I've had some training on Prophet (A model used by most Actuaries used to project profit. Get the pun? I'm afraid that's a typical example of the Actuarial sense of humour you'll have to get used to..) and using this to do some sensitivity testing. In this case I was measuring to what extent a change in lapse rates will affect profit. More so than Prophet, most Actuaries' No.1 tool is Excel. Most of my work since joining has been updating and analysing information in the forecasting spreadsheets.

The department and my team have been really welcoming. Since joining I've learnt so much about forecasting and HBOS' structure and products, but not without asking 100s of questions. Everyone on my team has gone out of their way to help me get my head around the work that I'm doing and it's really sped up the learning process.