Another actuary checking in from Institute of Actuaries Australia - I'm a "qualified" actuary (associate level) who decided to not even try for the fellowship exams and instead change course completely and do a PhD in Machine Learning.

No one outside of the actuarial industry cares or really knows what it means to be an actuary. Having an actuarial background in non-traditional actuarial areas is almost more of a curse than a blessing as people don't really know what to do with you. Furthermore actuaries seem to demand a premium for a cohort that don't have strong enough grounding to do ML research or enough development chops to be an ML engineer. So you end up competing with other people in the data science field...It really is a weird position to be in.