When children are asked what they want to be when they grow up, the answers often tend to be grandiose: astronaut, firefighter, footballer, or maybe even an influencer. Katie Garner's answer was different. When she was asked at an early age what she wanted to become, she didn't hesitate. She chose to be an actuary.
Years later, Garner is a senior consultant and team leader at actuarial consultancy LCP. She has become a leader, thoughtful, and slightly wary of stories that sound too tidy - including her own. On paper, her career reads as a straight line: an early knack for numbers, mathematics at the University of Bath, an actuarial internship, a graduate role, eight years of consulting, and a steady progression that eventually landed her in leadership.
That trajectory forms part of the reason she won this year's Young Actuarial Professional of the Year award. Yet she tends to frame the recognition less as a personal milestone and more as a reflection of how the actuarial profession itself is shifting.
Many actuaries arrive at their career through chance conversations or university careers fairs. For Garner, it has been the plan all along.
What she could not have anticipated was that the signature force shaping her career would extend far beyond technical fluency with equations. Over time, the real theme has become her instinct for people, for the atmosphere in a room, for the moment someone hesitates before speaking, for the pressures that sit behind polished presentations, and how to address them.
Risk translators
Consultancy appeals to Garner because it refuses to keep her in one box. "The breadth of work that you can get involved in," she says, gives her a grounding "across reserving, capital modelling, validation and some of the risk function support".
Although becoming an actuary was always her top choice, she could have also envisioned becoming a lawyer or a vet. This breadth of interests is reflected in her approach to her work, as she attempts to combine legal precision, analytical understanding and empathy in her day-to-day role.
As she has become more senior, she says it has become important to view her job from a macro perspective.
"Thinking about the business question and the business context," she says, "really changes as your career progresses." She returns repeatedly to a simple discipline: "Thinking about the why, what decision is trying to be made, or why does this matter?"
That question, for her, is also a guardrail against the false comfort of precision. Reserving, capital modelling and pricing "look quite different on the surface", she says, but they rely on the same mental model: "Really understanding risk drivers, their correlations and the underlying uncertainty." She sees the modern actuary less as a producer of outputs and more as someone who can move between functions and translate what the numbers mean when the world will not sit still.
Her view of the profession follows the same logic. "Actuaries are shifting from technical experts to risk translators," she says. The value is "helping firms, helping boards, interpret the complexity" and "articulating ranges, scenarios and not giving false certainty".
She argues that interdisciplinary subjects like data science, behavioural economics or operations will separate actuaries who thrive from those who simply compute.
What clients ask for, she says, reflects the same shift from outputs to interpretation. They want "visibility on why trends are moving". They want "the assumptions that we've made that build up to those projections". And they want uncertainty communicated plainly: "Ranges of estimates as opposed to just a kind of single best estimate."
Somewhere between math and psychology
Her role shows a profound understanding of market-facing work that matches that description: leading LCP's personal lines market projections and industry survey. It also highlights a breadth of advisory work, from reserving and capital modelling to underwriting strategy, economic scenario generators and expert witness support.
But Garner's interview keeps circling back to the part of the submission that is easiest to underestimate: the link between mental health, psychology and the quality of risk decisions.
"My role again has shifted from leading analysis and leading projects to supporting and developing my team," she says. "Making sure people feel supported, included and comfortable. Everyone should always feel like they can ask me questions."
The day-to-day mechanics are small but deliberate. In meetings, she creates space for the people who will not naturally take it.
She describes a leadership habit that sits uncomfortably in traditional actuarial culture: controlled vulnerability. "In the last year or so, I'm really learning to model vulnerability," she says, "in a way that builds trust rather than creates uncertainty."
That means being clear about limits without collapsing authority. "Being honest about what I'm still figuring out," she says, can "normalise that learning" and "reduce pressure on others that they don't need to have all the answers as well."
To my future self
Asked what she wants the role to look like in a decade, she says she wants to keep the technical satisfaction while leaning further into interpretation, but also to be "helping insurers understand emerging risks and understand complexity and uncertainty".
Her award, in that sense, signals more about what the industry is becoming and needs: technical range, yes, but also the ability to build teams that can face uncertainty without pretending it is not there.
In Garner's telling, psychological safety is a core part of actuarial control. It is how risk work stays honest when the temptation is to sound certain.
In a year that was marked by AI and geopolitical strain, the insurance industry is being forced to look uncertainty in the eye. Garner's response is steady rather than dramatic.
She returns to the same principles: ask what decision is being made, explain the assumptions clearly, invite challenge, leave room for doubt. The child who once wrote "actuary" in a yearbook could not have known that her career would be shaped as much by people as by probability.
Yet that early certainty has evolved into something more expansive. Today, her work is less about perfecting a model than about creating the conditions in which better judgements can emerge.
This award recognises her technical excellence, but also captures a professional learning that the quality of its numbers depends, quietly and profoundly, on the confidence of the people behind them.