SAS Certification as a Tool for Professional Development

If you had told me a year ago that I would write a paper about SAS certification for the Western Users of SAS Software 2014 Educational Forum and Conference, I would have been very surprised!  I became a SAS Certified Professional long ago, and that certification expired–long ago!  However, in the past six months, both my son and a friend have become SAS certified.  In the process, I learned a lot.

Now Andra Northup and I have written a paper titled SAS Certification as a Tool for Professional Development.  Doing the research for this paper, we gathered information and opinions both from SAS users and from experts at SAS Institute.  Here are some interesting things I learned:

• Over 67,000 SAS certificates have been awarded.
• The volume of tests taken has doubled in the past three years.
• The first SAS certification was in Europe and required passing 3 two-hour exams.
• Since 2006, certifications no longer expire, but are tied to a particular version of SAS.
• Some people claim that the Advanced exam is easier than the Base exam.
• The pass rate for the Advanced exam is, in fact, higher than for the Base exam.
• At only $55, the online practice exam for the Base exam is a bargain, and it’s good for six months.
• The SAS Programming 1: Essentials online self-paced course is FREE.

If you are going to the conference, I hope you will attend our presentation Thursday, September 4, 2014 2:00-2:50pm. If not, then you can download the paper here.

Using PROC SGPLOT for Quick High-Quality Graphs

Soon I will travel to San Jose for the Western Users of SAS Software 2014 Educational Forum and Conference.  I’m looking forward to doing a hands-on workshop on one of my favorite topics, ODS Graphics, specifically the PROCs SGPLOT and SGPANEL.  Here is the abstract:

New with SAS 9.2, ODS Graphics introduced a whole new way of generating graphs using SAS.  With just a few lines of code, you can create a wide variety of high-quality graphs.  This workshop shows how to produce several types of graphs using PROC SGPLOT, and how to create paneled graphs by converting PROC SGPLOT to PROC SGPANEL.  This workshop also shows how to send your graphs to different ODS destinations, how to apply ODS styles to your graphs, and how to specify properties of graphs, such as format, name, height, and width.

If you are going to the conference, I hope you will attend my workshop Thursday, September 4, 2014 4:00-6:00pm. If not, then you can download the paper, step-by-step handout, and syntax reference tables.