Get kitted out – A practical guide to SAS

certifications, MOOCs and hands-on

experience

Monday, 10 October 2016 Hannes Engberg Raeder

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Overview

• Four relevant SAS Certifications • Massive Open Online Courses • Take advantage of Hands-on Experience

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The Certifications

• SAS Certified Base Programmer for SAS 9 – The stepping stone to other SAS certications

• SAS Certified Advanced Programmer for SAS 9 – The one you really need to take

• SAS Certified Clinical Trials Programmer Using SAS 9 – The one they did for us

• SAS Certified Statistical Business Analyst Using SAS 9: Regression and Modeling – The one that introduces you to statistics

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How to become a SAS expert with SAS certifications

A few years of experience

Meet Jon – our SAS Programmer in a mid size CRO

How did Jon grow his SAS skills with SAS certifications?

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Jon‘s strategy

•  Integrated learning into daily work –  Switched to PROC SQL instead of DATA step –  Took macro programming to the next level

• For base and advanced: Practice exams • For statistics certification: Took online SAS course • Made use of literature

–  SAS Guides for Base and Advanced – Carpenter‘s Complete Guide to the SAS Macro

Language –  Programming in the Pharmaceutical Industry (Jack

Shostak)

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Massive Open Online Courses

Nothing other than distance learning Several providers cooperating with universities, Coursera, edX, Stanford Online... Offering various models, with or without certification Pros: Flexible learning, comprehensive range of topics Cons: Lack of f2f meetings, might not have the same weight as other certificates or courses

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Become an R programmer with Massive Open Online Courses

Meet Kim – Statistical Programmer at a small pharma company

Wanted to get a better understanding of inferential statistics and R programming

How did Kim make use of MOOCs?

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Massive Open Online Courses Example: R programming

Introduction to the R programming language No prior experience Explain how to install and set it up

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Massive Open Online Courses Example: Inferential statistics

Introduction to inferential statistics Uses R in the class Covers logistic regression and Fischer‘s exact test

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Hands-on experience

What it´s not – Random exposure to new tasks, methods,

software

What it is – Deliberate exposure to new tasks, methods,

software

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Hands-on Experience - Becoming an SDTM pro!

A few years experience programming analyis datasets and TFLs

Meet Tom – Statistician in a small CRO

No experience with SDTM other than using it as input

How did Tom gain the necessary experience?

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How Tom did it

• Got support from line manager –  Found a proper project to work on

•  Implementing into daily work –  Started off with assessing raw data –  Annotated CRFs –  Specified domains and created define.xml and Study

Data Reviewer‘s Guide

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• Questions?