Hi Blind, Been working as a data analyst for about 2 years now in healthcare. I've slowly accumulated knowledge in SAS and R, but I know that is nothing impressive. I've come here to ask for your advice on learning SAS as my first proficient data science language/platform. At the clinic, unless you work in research, you're using SAS for any data science. So I decided to follow the trend and enroll in the data science academy. But now, as I near finishing my 2nd certification exam, I realize that Im going down this specialized route and am scared that I will not be marketable even with the title SAS certified data scientist. I've been thinking about rushing through the rest of my SAS courses because they are good for teaching you about data science project structuring and common techniques used. Then just go straight to building my r and python skillset. I want to move into predictive modeling or computer vision in the future. What do you all think? Does learning SAS have good enough ROI, that you can justify learning it before Python and R? It won the latest Gartner quadrant. I'm just worried I'm going to put all this effort into some tool only the biggest (non-tech) companies use. Another thing, do SAS data scientists come off as business analysts when you look at it on a resume? Any thoughts are appreciated. TC: 60k
Most places are split between R or Python (with the occasional Spark/Scala/Go/MATLAB here and there..MATLAB especially for optimization work). SAS isn’t really a thing in the tech scene because it requires too much support and resources from engineers. Data scientists are expected to be jack of all trades and be able to ETL their own data and run large processing jobs to a certain degree, which overlaps with some engineering work and so requires programming languages. I have seen SAS specialists, but more in business analyst roles or ultra specialist research roles (is researching pharmaceutical supply chains)
With decent SAS knowledge and previous work exp you might be able to increase your pay up to 80k somewhere in insurance, banking, government and/or consulting. If you are almost done just finish it. As far as getting more than that or going to a tech company you will have a long way to go. That may require theoretical and engineering work. You did not mention your bachelor/background which has an impact. I am assuming non-stem degree
For larger healthcare companies, SAS still dominates the Patient Data-related Business Analytics. They'd rather not risk things so they stick to conventional commercial software. Healthcare is also known to be notoriously slow in adapting the latest tech trends. Maybe the CURES Act will speed things up, enabling APIs for patient data but that isn't certain yet. That being said, you're better off building Data Science projects in what you are comfortable with then get your foot in the door early. SAS isn't going away any time soon.
Gardner is a piece of crap and SAS is 10 yr old tool. If u talk of DS, python is where u need to be otherwise u r not going to get the right jobs