4 Step Roadmap to Launch Your SAS Career

SAS Roadmap

1. Download SAS University Edition

The SAS university edition is a high starting point. It’s seamless, easy to explore, and helps you build a solid foundational understanding of SAS. It’s free to download, so get your copy here.

Remember that the free version has limited functionality, and SAS’s advanced features are behind a pay-wall. Pricing from vendors like SAS is typically confidential and client-specific so that you can get a sense of the edition cost from SAS's site, but the subscription is between $7k and $9k a year for the underlying Windows analytics package.

2. Brush Up Your SQL Know-how and Other Statistical Skills

SQL, regression modeling, time series analysis, ANOVA, and many other statistical skills are essential when you work with SAS. Get up to speed in these areas before you delve into the nitty-gritty of SAS itself.

3. Books, Tutorials, Videos – Explore Them All

There are tons of free resources available over the internet for looking to learn SAS.

For practice, visit developer hubs like GitHub. Benchmark your creations against sample code-shared by SAS learners around the world. ‘The Little SAS Book’ is another useful resource for SAS learners.

Simplilearn’s online library has a vast collection of articles and resources on SAS and related topics. Visit the blog to explore.

4. Consider a SAS Certification

Once you have a sound understanding of the basics, it’s time to explore advanced topics. While freely-available resources will help you get started with SAS, formal training is indispensable for those looking to build a career in the field. SAS certification courses include hands-on practice with live industry projects and give you the experience you need to enter the industry.

Inferential statistics, logistic regression, clustering and segmentation, decision trees, PROC IML, PROC SQL are all powerful techniques that lie within the ambit of SAS, and there is no better way to gain a working knowledge of these tools than to enroll in a SAS certification training program.  

The following are a few SAS certification courses for learners:

• SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9
• SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9
• SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS 9
• SAS Certified Predictive Modeler Using SAS Enterprise Miner 7
• SAS Certified Statistical Business Analyst Using SAS 9: Regression and Modeling
• SAS Certified BI Content Developer for SAS 9
• SAS Certified Data Integration Developer for SAS 9
• SAS Certified Platform Administrator for SAS 9

Conclusion

Simplilearn offers a Data Science courses tailored to your needs and mentored by the best leaders in the industry. Actual coding examples and demos make learning comprehensive and interactive, while industry projects help you gain hands-on work experience.