How to get job through SAS in Pharmaceutical industry. Key points....

SAS (pronounced "sass", originally Statistical Analysis System) is an integrated system of software products provided by SAS Institute Inc. that enables programmers to perform:

• Retrieval, management, and mining
• Report writing and graphics
• Statistical Analysis.
• Business planning, forecasting, and decision support
• Operations research and project management
• Quality improvement
• Applications development
• Data warehousing (extract, transform, load)
• Platform independent and remote computing

How can you qualify for and obtain a SAS programming job in the pharmaceutical industry?

SAS programmers, like all computer programmers, come from diverse backgrounds. The typical SAS programmer in the pharmaceutical industry has a sciencebased undergraduate degree and was exposed to SAS programming in college. Training to be a SAS programmer is usually done while on the job through work experience, company-sponsored classes, and SAS Institute courses. 

So if most of the training for these jobs is on the job, how can you position yourself to get a job as a SAS programmer in the pharmaceutical industry? 

Here are some things that will help you qualify for a job:

Get a master’s or bachelor’s degree in statistics or computer science. Other science degrees that have a strong analytical or life science basis are useful as well.

Instead of experience, get certified. SAS offers a variety of certifications, including the relevant “SAS Certified Base Programmer” and “SAS Certified Advanced Programmer.” 
The SAS certification Web page can be found at 
http://support.sas.com/certify/index.html. 


Philadelphia University offers a certification program called the “SAS Programming Certificate for the Pharmaceutical Industry.” More information about this program can be found at http://www.philau.edu/continuinged/sascert.html. There are also other SAS certification programs that you can find by doing an Internet search.

Additional things you need to do:

• Network with professionals in the industry. Friends or contacts in the industry can serve as valuable job references. 
• Attending local, regional and national SAS user group meetings is an excellent way to network as well. SAS keeps a list of users group at: 

http://support.sas.com/usergroups/