The Lucrative Career as a SAS Specialist

What are the top 10 demanding careers to excel in today’s job market? You may be thinking that career in Enterprise IT Architecture, Cloud Storage & Distribution, Big Data, Mobile application development, Project Management and few more are the best career opportunities. You may be correct in your thinking, but if you are missing the SAS (Statistical Analysis System), then you are doing a big mistake. SAS specialists are no way lesser than any of these highly demanding jobs.

According to ITCareerFinder.com, SAS specialists are one of the most demanding professional which falls in the range of top 10 highly demanding skills. The career as an SAS professional is very lucrative. According to the survey conducted by payscale.com, the average pay boost to the SAS professionals is around 6.1 percent, a little higher than the Data Mining and Data Modelling Professionals. Isn’t it sounding good?

Whether you are a fresher or an experienced person, learning the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) is not a big deal. There are easy options for all type of learners. Let’s discuss more on it.

How to Start Your SAS Learning

If you are new to SAS and wants to build your career as an SAS professional, then here is a good news for you that, you can learn it for free without paying a dime. So, whether you are an experienced or a fresher, you can learn this amazing tool for free. Let’s find out how?

There are many e-learning programs are available online to help you to study SAS. You can also start your e-learning program at support.sas.com for free. That is the official site of SAS. You just need to create your online profile under ‘My Training’ section and start your e-learning program. Also, there are other options such as you can download the SAS University Edition from SAS.com and start your study by installing the virtual app through any virtualization software.

The basic steps to download and install the SAS University Edition from SAS.com are as follows.

• Go to sas.com download section
• First, download the Quick Start Guide (PDF or Video)
• Then, install the Oracle VirtualBox virtualization software on your machine as the application requires it to run on your system
• Download the SAS University Edition vApp. It will ask you to create your profile and it gets downloaded once you accept the license agreement
• Once downloaded, follow the steps in the Quick Start Guide to set up the SAS University Edition

What are the Certifications of SAS

Once you complete your learning program by using any of the options, the next step is to go for certification. There are various levels of certification which you can obtain to boost your SAS career.

Foundation Tools

• SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9
• SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9
• SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS 9

Advanced Analytics

• SAS Certified Data Scientist Using SAS 9
• SAS Certified Advanced Analytics Professional Using SAS 9
• SAS Certified Predictive Modeller Using SAS Enterprise Miner 13
• SAS Certified Statistical Business Analyst Using SAS 9: Regression and Modelling

Business Intelligence and Analytics

• SAS Certified BI Content Developer for SAS 9
• SAS Certified Visual Business Analyst: Exploration and Design Using SAS Visual Analytics

There are much more to add to the list. You can get more details through your training providers or at sas.com- the official website.

The Career Path as an SAS Programmer

As an SAS programmer, you have plenty of opportunities to avail across the various industries. The growing demands of SAS professionals in Banking and financial sectors, Pharmaceutical industries and other such industries involved in research and development works has regular openings for SAS professionals.

Most of these companies rely heavily on SAS. Over the years they have been working with SAS for their reporting and analysis purpose, and already invested a lot in terms of cost and resources. So, they can’t be simply moved away from SAS in exchange of any alternate tools like R or Tableau.