Company: Virgin Money
Company background: Virgin Money is a full-service digital bank with a heritage stretching back over 180 years. A proud member of the Virgin Group, we are driven by our purpose to 'Make you happier about money'. We bring the best of the Virgin brand to make banking better. We offer market-leading products and services to meet the full range of our 6.6m customers' retail and business banking needs via our leading technology platform, telephone banking and a national network of innovative stores and business banking centres.
Contact: Damien Hellewell
Title: Senior Data Design Manager
Country: United Kingdom
Award Category: Professional Growth Award
Tell us how you or your team have used SAS training resources to learn a new skill or answer your questions?
We initially launched SAS monthly webinars with my individual team supported by the SAS Customer Success team. Following several successful sessions, we opted to roll out the webinars to a wider SAS audience inviting SAS users from across the business to attend. Our last webinar ran on 25th May 2023 and had 41 Virgin Money attendees.
How has what you learned benefited your work or career? How has training advanced your team's success using SAS?
A good example where the SAS webinars have benefitted my team would be when adopting the next version of SAS Enterprise Guide. The SAS Enterprise Guide 8 Hidden Gems webinar organized via SAS Customer Success was chosen to support users moving from Enterprise Guide 7 to Enterprise Guide 8.
What was your/your team's favorite course, resource or learning engagement?
Peter Hobart has been a favourite resource we’ve been able to call upon to either deliver SAS user webinars or provide 121 best practice advice. He’s approachable, extremely knowledgeable and always receives positive feedback from the sessions he delivers to the Virgin Money SAS User Community.
How have you used SAS resources to train your team?
When new members join the team we use SAS’ free resources to help get them up and running in the world of SAS for example, the FREE SAS Programming 1 e-Learning course. And, we’re now in the process of constructing a SAS onboarding programme to support new SAS users joining the Virgin Money. We plan to include in the onboarding programme a live session for all new SAS users to provide essential information such as the routes to get support both internally & via SAS company channels. The live session will be followed by a series of recorded sessions to help new starters work with data to perform efficient queries, manipulation and accurate outputs.
How has this benefitted your organization? Can you quantify any of the benefits?
Ultimately, we’d like SAS programmers and the programs they write and maintain to be at their most efficient. This isn’t always the case for example when code is inherited from programmer to another. Therefore, the SAS monthly webinars have enabled us to pick-up topics of interest amongst the SAS community and showcase best practices with the goal to make our SAS programmers and programs more efficient consequently optimizing the SAS platform resources.
What advice would you give to new SAS users?
A few good topics to study when you first start using SAS as part of your work include; IF-THEN logic, dropping & keeping columns, the difference between WHERE vs. IF, and merging tables using DATA step - in particular, consider sorting, variables & duplicates.
