u/ThrowRA3648537

Hi all,

I posted last month about struggling with my manager’s competency. While I still haven’t spoken up, I have since had more complaints made about her to my face and several of our closest collaborators express sympathy for the situation I’m in.

Now I have an exam scheduled for next week and my manager has been ignoring my study hours. We’ve talked for months about my study plans and she expressed no concern about the timing. Due to our current project dragging out, I’ve cut my planned study hours in half and skipped 90% of the ones I left on my schedule.

She has told me two weeks in a row that I can catch up once the project is done, which would’ve been fine if it’d been true. She’s used our weekly meetings to jump straight into immediate deliverables and hasn’t inquired about my studying for over a month. The one conversation that we had was brief and it felt like I was pulling teeth. She was ready to jump from the call to start her PTO and I don’t think she listened to a word.

This is on top of the fact that she always seems to let me work on less urgent tasks until 15 minutes before my scheduled study time begins… I have received an urgent request at the worst possible time nearly every day. If I didn’t know better, I would say it’s deliberate. She’s watched me work 20+ hours in the past couple weeks while marked as OOO and not once commented or asked. Feels like she’s exploiting my fear of advocating for myself.

I’m not even sure what advice I’m looking for, as I’m sure it will be to speak up and vouch for myself. I think I’m naturally oriented toward working with thoughtful, proactive people who stay on top of things like this. All of my managers before her were mindful of my schedule and I’ve always been sure to show the same respect to our interns and other analysts. This is infuriating. Thanks for reading my vent.

Edit: To preempt the question of why I didn’t speak up, I decided that it wasn’t my job as a pre-ASA to risk my nascent career at such a stressful time when any one of the experience actuaries who have complained about her could do it themselves.

I realized this might be the place to get some advice on my work situation. I’m a near-ASA with a little over three years of experience and I have been struggling with my manager in this rotation. I’ve always assumed that being an FSA ensured a minimum level of competency, but my current manager is making me doubt that.

Without giving specifics so as to remain anonymous, my manager is a seasoned FSA who joined us from another company. While I didn’t mind explaining product features and projects at first, we’ve now been working together for over a year and I still have to remind her of basic concepts that we work with on a regular basis. It’s pretty demoralizing and our team is organized such that I produce most of our reports and have thus far been able to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. When she has directly taken on work, feedback from other teams has made it clear that I’m not the only person with questions.

Has anyone else ever dealt with something like this? How does someone survive in this profession for 20+ years while performing like this?