My husband is a catastrophe analyst. Does this occupation, sometimes called catastrophe modelling, even exist in Australia or is it called something else?

We have been keeping an eye out for opportunities for the best part of a year and have seen maybe one or two things that look to be vaguely similar but that is it. Hubby getting quite concerned about his prospects and I am not looking for a house husband.

Hmm, 'Insurance Assessor' sounds so much less impressive than 'Catastrophe Analyst', doesn't it ;-)

In general there is little attention on the wider and deeper aspects of risk in Australian commerce. They don't have the Civil Contingencies act to push them, or the examples of how unstable their corporate systems are to shocks. I'd suggest therefore you either try to sell those skills to an insurance company as something they should be offering to clients; or expand the skill base to cover resilience planning etc. and look to offer a service to larger companies and regional governments - quantifying and planning for large scale risks.

I bet he wears a marvel comics superhero outfit, and when there's a flood etc he turns up and says something like 'Stand back, I'm a catastrophe analyst'.

I'm married ... I consider the job descriptions equal.

+1

jokes aside, this is a very involved engineering occupation - the guys i met back in the day were in fact fresh off reconstructing events in Chernobyl. They did work as "expert witnesses" for an insurance companies, so I guess insurance industry guys would be a better way to start, depending on their specializations

HTH

I guess in Oz the closest thing you can get is running out of beer at a barbie?

Or failure to provide enough snags.

then the catastrophe analyst, just by looking at a 25 ft crater and employing nothing but a measuring tape and some clever charts would write a report saying - you mate bought not enough beer, while you were distracting The Cook while that particular sausage fragment sticking out of that poor chaps bottom was being burned to a crisp, while that $^%the@d in a off-white baseball cap asked the neigbourgh's rottweiler "what the F are you looking at". Insurance guys would then know who to pay what. Simple pimple.

I thought a more Aussie 'She'll Be Right' would suffice but I see the need for extra detail.

(Native Instruments) Ah yes, my kind of technology, if we was marooned on a desert island then a laptop and a copy of Reaktor would keep me going

But one has a salary attached to it and the other does not.

Fair point ...

Thanks for all the responses everyone .. I think.

Actually he is not an engineer but he does work in the insurance industry. But catastrophe analysis in UK is in fact about statisctics and financial modelling. I can't seem to find anything similar in Australia.

Any danger he can tell me why my home and contents premium has gone up from $780 to $1070 this year?

Suncorp ... "Must Have Insurance" apparently ... "Must Have No Sense To Shop Around" more like.

<drifts off topic ... again ... expects a jack-boot in the rear from a mod anytime soon ...>

..... or who not to pay or how to avoid paying client - part of role description for insurance guy......


Anyway, I thought a catastrophe analyst would be another name for a politician....?

lots of politics involved. There are two main kinds of modeling apparently - ones to do with designing something, and how to make it idiot proof (industrial risk management I'd guess be a proper term) the other one is to restore a sequence of events after it all went pearshaped to avoid repeating design mistakes in the future. Both are very valuable, and usually employed in very high stakes situations - buildings, public infrastructure, etc.

Or, we just remove warning labels off everything and wait for the problem to resolve itself. Bermudashort's OH will have time to retrain while that happens