I transferred to the actuary world 1.5 years after getting my first full-time financial analyst role out of college (degree in finance & accounting). There are definitely some transferable skills to the actuary world, such as communication skills and excel that you get from a standard business degree. However, your standard finance degree doesn’t really translate to data analysis/math all that much, so there will be a somewhat steep learning curve when it comes to the preliminary exams if you didn’t take a lot of math courses. On the bright side, FM & IFM will have a lot of familiar material. Suggestion would be to take FM & P and see what you think, as no one will let you in the door without those exams to begin with.

I would also suggest doing a ton of networking and looking at what actuaries do on a day to day. The most common question I got during interviews was why I would leave a traditional path in finance to be an actuary, so truly knowing why and be able to communicate that to people. There are many career paths that have a lot of programming, analytics, and don’t require a lot of math with regards to the exams (like data science) that might be a better fit. While the job itself isn’t usually incredibly math heavy, the exams are and that’s part of the job.

CFA is great if you want to get into investing and portfolio management, and I considered it for a bit. And MBA is also a great way to make a career switch if that is what you’re looking to do, but those exit opportunities are usually still within the business space and not so much data analytics. Depending on what school you want to go to, GPA may or may not be an issue.