Training suggestions for a new SAS administrator

[ShelleySessoms]

I was contacted recently by a community member, asking for my suggestions on training for a new SAS Administrator. I replied via email, and then thought this information might be helpful to more community members. So here are my thoughts. Do you have suggestions to add?

Regarding introductory training, I suggest the following webinars and courses:

Ask the Expert free admin sessions. You could easily follow these free webinars in the order listed, to get a basic understanding of the tasks.

The other courses truly depend on your environment. But a good, generic one to start is:

• SAS Environment Manager: Essentials
• This course, Managing the SAS Platform with SAS Environment Manager, is a nice follow-on to the one above.
• The courses above are one-day courses. For a much more intensive training, I suggest SAS Platform Administration: Fast Track. This is a four-day course which can help prepare you for SAS Platform Administration certification.

The courses above, plus involvement in the administration community, will go a long way in your admin training.

Should you have additional questions about the courses or requirements, please visit the training page for SAS Platform Administrators.

[MichelleHomes]

A great question to ask the community and especially as the role of the SAS administrator has evolved over the years.

There have been a few blog posts written in the past that have some additional resources that may be useful as well as the comments where people have shared their experiences and added further links. Worth checking out for ideas:

• SAS Administrator roles and responsibilities: a recap
• SAS Administrator connections and resources
• What makes a GREAT SAS administrator?

Kind Regards,

Michelle

[JuanS_OCS · Accepted solution]

This is a great post, and I would propose it for being a sticky post, actually. THank you for the initiative.

All the references that I see above are absolutely top-notch, a must-to-have.

I would like to add just one more, that I have been gladly and very positively impresed: the efforts done by @anja in the Super Food the the SAS Administrator brain. All the 4 parts/URLs can be found at https://communities.sas.com/t5/Administration-and-Deployment/Admin-Brain-Food-Like-a-yummy-Granola-b...

Besides this, I always recommend the SAS documentation, specially the Administration and Installation documents at https://support.sas.com/documentation/ in case anyone needs specific information about Administration of one specific SAS Solution. 

I would like to add that many people is asking for what you need to pass the exam, or for an interview. The tests are not required at all for the exam, and no pre-filled questionaire will really help you in the real life. Better get prepared and be confident on yourself, in your knowledge and your potential. 

My best suggestion to anyone is to keep in mind that this role requires technical skills (hard skills) but also often requires soft skills such as communication, coordination, interpersonal skills. Sometimes even leadership skills. There are no shortcuts for those, but I feel fully confident on the personal growth of a SAS Administrator.

[ShelleySessoms]

Thank you @JuanS_OCS and @MichelleHomes for the additional suggestions. All great ideas! I'm going to mark this post as Accepted so it will help others in their search for admin training. But everyone is welcome to continue posting their training ideas and suggestions.

[D_e_n_n_i_s]

Thanks for the terrific training references !!  I have been SAS Admin at my company for only a couple of years and we are just moving out of purely Dev, though not yet in Production.  Updates to our original installation of fouled up our OA and VA server configurations so badly that we've looked to an outside vendor to help re-install SAS (Their suggestion).  I've had SAS Tech Support walk me through updates and even then we are in bad shape at the moment.

I'm not asking for help with our situation.  We have a few thousand users at our company.  What I'm curious about is understanding how other company SAS Admins are handling the server and client administration that comes with such a deep and broad product as SAS?  I've read through a lot of SAS documentation, have spoken with some of the authors and even had them accept changes that I've suggested, so I've been sincerely trying to do my due diligence to learn and administer SAS.  I took a class where we really just read a PDF document, though the instructors were great, and have tried to come up to speed on SAS with all of the other duties of my job.  Having worked with a lot of products, server administration, networking, development (MCSD, MCSE, MCDBA), I'm not a novice at this stage of my career, yet I struggle with all of the intricacies of administering SAS.

Soooo Admins, how do YOU manage SAS?  Do you pay vendors recommended by SAS to perform the work?  Do you read as many PDF's to come up to speed on each task?  Do you call SAS Tech Support for most tasks?  SAS has some terrific documentation and wonderful Tech Support, but I just have to wonder how folks manage updates, general administration, etc. ???  I'd like to see if there is some consensus so I can emulate our successful SAS Admins 🙂 !!!  Thanks !!