North American insurers increasingly hiring for advanced analytics and data science degrees

Employees with advanced degrees in analytics and data science are increasingly attractive to property and casualty insurers in North America, according to a new study from Strategy Meets Action.

P&C insurers plan to increase the percentage of staff for big data projects with advanced degrees and training from 21% to 51% by 2016, according to the report, Big Data in Insurance, sponsored by ISO (a Verisk Analytics business) and SAS, a business analytics software and service provider.

Among those firms with more than $1 billion in premiums, 39% are investing in big data analytics, compared with 14% of those companies with under $1 billion in premiums.

Claims frequency and severity is the area of business seeing the highest implementation of big data analytics by companies (59%), followed by underwriting profitability (55%) and new business analytics (44%).

Insurers ranked “variety” and “veracity” as the main challenges when it comes to big data projects, above “velocity,” “volume” and “value.”

Variety refers to the challenge of managing and making sense of the many types of data that matter to insurers and veracity refers to developing a system to ensure that data is verified and accurate, according to the report.