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JVarghese
Obsidian | Level 7

Can anyone with real job experience please suggest me a plan for getting SAS certified. I am thinking of doing a masters degree in either Statistics or Actuarial science in fall 2014 and I got prevoius learning experience in a few programming languages like c, java, sql. Being not sure of getting the admission, I think I should be able to find a job in SAS programming/analysis in the other case. If I would get the admission then still I can make use of my certification and skills towards my stat/act degree. I enjoy learning myself and would also like to know of a fair estimated time to get prepared for the cert exam. Right now I am at home preparing for my studies while I am babysitting my boy (Just to let you guys know) . All your practical suggestions will be appreciated. Thank you.

2 REPLIES 2
Mark2010
SAS Employee

Base Programming is a great place to start because it ensures that you know how to prepare your data using the SAS DATA Step for analysis with SAS statistical procedures. Your familiarity with other languages will help, as SAS uses many of the same constructs as other programming languages (data in, data out, variables, conditional statements, loops, arrays, text and arithmetical functions, etc). With concentrated effort, I would expect that you could prepare in 3-6 months.Once you've tackled Base Programming, then you may want to consider Advanced Programming (which adds macro, SQL, and efficient coding techniques) or one of our Analytics Credentials.

I work for SAS on our certification team. One of the first things I needed to do when I joined SAS was to learn SAS programming. I did this through classroom, leader-led training. But there are other avenues as well. Programming 1 and Programming 2 (foundational courses for base programming) are available as self-paced e-Learning. Special pricing may be available in your country. Check http://support.sas.com/training for availability.

Alternatively, there is also the Cert Prep guide, and other books that people have used to teach themselves SAS.

Regardless of the materials that you use to learn SAS programming, practice will be critical to you truly learning SAS. If you have access to SAS already, great. If not, you may want to consider a six or twelve month licence for SAS On Demand for Professionals (available in US and Canada).

Sorry for all the links to SAS training/publications products, I don't mean this to sound like a sales pitch, but I did want to let you know about some resources we have available for learning SAS. Good luck!

JVarghese
Obsidian | Level 7

Thank you Mark. I am thinking of buying the prep guide + one year licence of the software.

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