Category Archives: SAS Certification

The Cheapskate’s Guide to SAS Certification

We’re all setting our APOs right now and thinking about our goals for the coming year. For many of us, our professional goals include increasing our SAS knowledge and possibly even getting SAS certified. If you’re new to SAS and want the full training package from scratch, you may have googled the closest SAS training facility and created a wish list that looks something like this:

Training for Base Programming Exam:
SAS Programming I: Essentials: $1500
SAS Programming II: Data Manipulation Techniques: $1800
OR
SAS Certification Review: Base Programming for SAS 9 (if you’re more advanced and would just like a review): $1000
base practice exam: $52
base certification exam: $180

Training for Advanced Programming Exam:
SAS Programming III: Advanced Techniques and Efficiencies: $1800
SAS Macro Language I: Essentials: $1200
SAS SQL I: Essentials $1200
advanced practice exam: $52
advanced certification exam: $180

SAS does offer certification packages which include practice exams and exam vouchers in addition to classroom-based training courses, which can help you save on your total cost. If you’re willing to substitute online courses for live classroom training, you’ll save even more.

But let’s say you want the deluxe classroom experience, and you’re doing the whole thing a la carte. For Base training plus certification, your total cost could be as much as $3532. For Advanced training plus certification, you could spend $4432. For both, that’s $7964, which is close to the yearly tuition reimbursement cap that my employer offers for grad school.

So what happens if you take your list to your manager, and she says it’s not in the budget for this year? You have two options:

1. Throw up your hands and use this as an excuse not to learn SAS.
2. Decide to find another way to learn SAS.

If you go with option 2, you’re going to have to foot the costs yourself, so you’re going to want to find the most cost-effective way possible to do this. It’s going to take more work on your part, but you can do this for free with a little creativity and the willpower to self-study.

Step 1: Get Free Training

My employer’s intranet site offers a link to Books 24×7 which allows employees to access all kinds of free training materials; check to see if your employer offers a similar resource. Books 24×7 includes both SAS Certification Prep Guides:

SAS Certification Prep Guide: Base Programming for SAS 9
SAS Certification Prep Guide: Advanced Programming for SAS 9

This is a great value to you since each prep guide has a list price of $129. If you insist on having a paper copy, look for deals on eBay, Half.com, or Amazon. Do the practice quizzes at the end of each chapter and open up your code editor window in SAS and practice using different functions and procedures on your own.

You can supplement these guides with other free SAS reference materials on support.sas.com (huge library of pdf files) or books 24×7. If manuals aren’t enough for you, take advantage of your local SAS user group meetings and explore the online SAS community. However, it is completely possible to use these techniques and pass your certification test without having to pay for any classroom instruction.

Step 2: Take the Exam

Each certification exam costs $180 at the time of this posting. If you’ve learned SAS through self-study, you’ve already saved your department a lot of money and made yourself a more valuable employee. You might not be able to get $4000 out of your department’s training budget, but you might be able to get the $180 exam fee reimbursed if you ask nicely.

If you can’t get your department to fork out the $180 for each exam, you can either choose to forgo certification (although I find having a concrete goal at the end of the learning process helps me to stay motivated), or you can pay it yourself and still get certified for a fraction of the original $7964.

SAS Certification Resources

SAS currently offers a number of certifications, including:

  • SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9
  • SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9
  • SAS Certified Predictive Modeler Using SAS Enterprise Miner 5 or 6
  • SAS Certified Platform Administrator for SAS 9
  • SAS Certified Data Integration developer for SAS 9
  • SAS Certified BI Content Developer for SAS 9

The Base certification is a prerequisite for the Advanced certification, which focuses on Proc SQL, SAS Macro Language, and Advanced Programming Techniques including how to optimize your programs. SAS recommends having at least a year of SAS programming experience before taking the Base certification exam, and three years or more experience with databases and/or SAS programming before taking the Advanced exam. In this blog posting, I will focus on the first two “Foundation” certifications rather than the other specialty tracks involving Enterprise Miner and BI platforms.

I came to SAS with a background in SQL Server, so I was already very familiar with writing queries and stored procedures in T-SQL (a SQL dialect particular to MS SQL Server). SQL is a very portable language, and my skills transferred easily to SAS via Proc SQL. After I had done some projects in SAS with the help of The Little SAS Book and the SAS 9.1 SQL Procedure User’s Guide (you can download the pdf file for free online), I decided that I wanted to round out my SAS skills a little more and learn how to take advantage of more of the features that SAS has to offer. Since my organization did not have funding for SAS traning due to budget constraints, I needed a way to learn on my own. The best way for me to do this in an organized fashion was to get a copy of the SAS Certification Prep Guides for Base and Advanced programming. 

As I went through the prep guides, I did the practice quizzes at the end of each chapter and experimented with new functions and procedures in my own work projects so that I would have a library of sample code for myself to refer back to later. However, because I like to have a goal to keep me focused, the key for me was to schedule the certification exam ahead of time so that I knew I had a certain number of weeks to get through the material and would be held accountable and tested on a specific date. This forced me to review and practice the material. SAS also offers practice exams for the Base and Advanced programming certifications (there is a fee for this – $52 at the time of this post). I did not purchase for the Base SAS exam, but I found the extra practice helpful for the Advanced SAS exam. In addition to these practice exams, you can preview a few free sample questions for each certification on the SAS website. Even if your organization does not have the funding to send employees to SAS training classes, you may find, as I did, that your employer is willing to reimburse you for the cost of your exam. In the end, I found that going through the certification process was a good way for me to round out my knowledge of SAS and motivate myself with a specific end goal.