I used to work in Pensions but am now in GI. In
general:
- GI can be more technical, although people are kidding themselves if they think this is true of all GI work. What is true is that the
range of technical work in GI is a lot wider than Pensions. You can be an expert in pretty much all pension-related issues. You can't possibly do the same for GI.
- The real difference should be to compare Corporate Pensions work (where you advise a company about how to manage how much they pay for their employees' pension benefits) and Trustee Pensions work (where you help determine the value of benefits, or you advise the people responsible for safeguarding pensions). In general, corporate work can be really interesting. Trustee work... not so much.
- You learn a lot more about business, and commercial awareness in Pensions than other actuarial fields. This is because your clients will be all sorts of businesses. In contrast, insurance is a specialised field.
- The easiest way to describe life is that it is a hybrid between Pensions and GI work. Life insurers tend to be large, so they have lots of data with which to work out how much to charge for their products, and how many claims they'll need to pay.
- Investments tends to be 'sexy' because of all the people who want to work in a bank. Eeeew. That's not the reason to go into investments. There's a lot going for investments - some investment actuaries build some really complex models - but there's also a lot which appears to be common sense.
A friend told me yesterday that when he worked in investments, he used to have to come up with multiple ways of saying the same thing to stop the client complaining that he wasn't getting any value. He got very good at writing variations of 'your fund manager has disappointed this month', 'the investment performance by your manager has been poor', 'other investments have outperformed your fund' etc.
Basically - join anywhere that'll take you (the market isn't so hot), and rest easy in the knowledge that you can make a role what you want it to be if you're enthusiastic enough.