SAS specialties
Before you start looking for work in the SAS field, it is important to decide what kind of SAS job you are looking for. These are examples of job titles or categories that may require SAS skills:
- Programmer
- Database administrator
- Data warehouse architect
- Data warehouse specialist
- ETL specialist
- Developer
- Business analyst
- Financial analyst
- Marketing analyst
- Securities analyst
- Statistics programmer
- Statistician
- Quality analyst
- Clinical data programmer
- Report programmer
- Database programmer
- Systems/network programmer
No employer expects to hire a worker who can do everything. Instead, they are looking for a narrowly focused set of skills to fit a specific job requirement. As a job-seeker, you will not want to apply for every SAS job opening you can find. When you learn of an opening, see how its focus and requirements fit with your skills and interests.
Salaries
People who are thinking of making a career in SAS work often ask the question: How much money do SAS specialists make? Pay rates depend on location, employer, position, experience, and other factors, but are generally in line with the pay of other computer specialists and data analysis specialists.
You can track computer-industry salaries with any of the various published salary surveys, such as the ones provided by DataMasters:
Finding SAS jobs
If you are searching for a job as a SAS specialist, in general, you should use the same techniques that you would use for any category of computer work. You might:
- Read job listings
- Contact employers directly
- Ask people you know where the jobs might be
- Talk to recruiting and contract employment agencies
Job sites
These job sites have a special emphasis on SAS jobs:
This site hopes to list SAS job openings across Europe:
Searching for SAS at job sites
Use “SAS” as a search term when you search for jobs at job listing sites and in employers’ job databases. Note that “SAS” does not necessarily appear in a job title even when the job involves working with SAS all day long.
SAS is usually distinctive enough as a search term to find what you are looking for, but not always. In search results, be careful of terms that could be confused with SAS but won’t help you find the SAS job you’re looking for, such as these:
- SAS 70 is a business auditing standard, not related to SAS.
- SAS at the University of Pennsylvania is the School of Arts and Sciences, the largest school in the university.
- To travelers, SAS is an abbreviation for Scandinavian Airlines and forms part of the name of some European hotels.
- SAS in the U.K. is an abbreviation for various things including an elite military group, an academic research consortium associated with the University of London, and the Small Area Statistics published by the Census.
SAS may also be seen as a variant of the STAR acronym for stories in a job interview. According to the STAR approach, in a story about your work, you describe a situation or task (ST), the action you took (A), and the result (R). The SAS version of this simplifies the outline of the story to situation (S), action (A), and success (S).
Employers
There are hundreds of employers that regularly hire SAS specialists. These are a few of them:
The technical interview
The interview process for a SAS job covers various subject areas related to the position and the candidate, and it may include a technical interview with questions intended to evaluate the candidate’s SAS savvy. The following document lists common subjects of technical questions about SAS.
SAS technical interview questions
Also see the following discussions for actual and suggested questions. (Many of these questions are out of date because of the time that has gone by since the interviews took place. However, it is not at all unusual for a technical interviewer to ask questions based on a limited understanding of the technology or one that stopped evolving ten or twenty years ago. If you know these questions might be coming, you’ll be prepared to answer them in a constructive way.)
sconsig.com List of Actual SAS Technical Interview Questions
