How SAS training courses can supercharge your data analytics capabilities

According to Jobsite indeed.com, in the first quarter of 2020, job postings requiring SAS analytics skills increased by 31%. Another recruitment site reported that SAS Analytics skills are predicted to grow by 4.1% over the next decade. 

These statistics show an increasing demand trend for SAS Analytics skills in the job market, which is a direct result of the increased dependence on data for everyday business operations.

Today, more than ever, data analytics plays a critical role in organisational decision making across the board. From sourcing to customer service, every business function of a modern organisation relies on insights delivered by data analytics.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) predicts that businesses across the world will collect, process, and store more than 463 exabytes of data each day by 2025, increasing the need for qualified data analytics experts.

That said, the WEF also reports there will be a skills gap in the coming years due to the demand for data analytics far exceeding the supply of required skills. 

The summary of it is that you need to invest in educating your teams on analytics skills to stay ahead of the competition. Enrolling your teams in SAS training courses is the best way to go about it.

There is a SAS training course for every analytics requirement

Although the word data analytics is thrown around a lot these days in business jargon, it is only a blanket term referring to different types of analytics processes like machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networking, data visualisation and more.

While your teams may be proficient at ingesting numbers into your SAS Analytics platform and optimising it to deliver basic analytics insights, any detailed analytics will require a deep knowledge of the disciplines mentioned above.

Facial recognition, for example, requires knowledge of machine learning and artificial intelligence programming techniques to build the most accurate biometric identification system.

Fortunately, several SAS training courses focus on specific data analytics disciplines. You can choose training courses according to your data analytics requirements and enrol your teams to maximise your ROI on SAS Analytics.

SAS training allows you to perform SAS administration

In recent years, SAS developers have made significant progress in making the data analytics platform more intuitive and more accessible to everyday users. 

Today, someone with a surface level knowledge of MS Excel can use the platform and produce actionable insights.

The same is not true for SAS administration, however. While it’s an integral part of optimising the SAS Analytics platform, it remains inaccessible to regular users.

To borrow an example from the Linux community, using SAS analytics is like installing Ubuntu, anybody with basic computer knowledge can do it; SAS Administration, meanwhile, is more like installing Arch Linux, you need some computer wizardry to pull it off successfully.  

The fact of the matter is that SAS Administration is a job for experts.

Fortunately, SAS courses provide hands-on training and theoretical knowledge on how to become a good SAS Administrator, reducing the dependence on third-party administrators for updates and maintenance.

SAS training courses will reduce spending on analytics

Today, many organisations don’t have an internal SAS expert and outsource their analytics requirements to third-party providers. 

Although third-party providers can augment your efforts with their expertise, hiring an external analytics team can cost your organisation thousands of dollars.

By leveraging SAS training, you can employ an internal analytics team to fulfil your analytics needs, eliminating the cost of hiring outsourced experts.

SAS training courses are a great way to close the SAS skills gap

SAS Analytics skills have become some of the most sought after skills in the job market due to the emergence of data analytics in recent years. 

Unfortunately, the demand far exceeds the supply. SAS training courses can help plug this skills gap.

Can SAS training help you make better business decisions?

What would you say is the main difference between modern business decision-making compared to the past?

In my opinion, the defining aspect of modern decision-making is the integration of data analytics. It is the main difference between the past, the present and the future.

Although decisions made in the past did involve some data, decision-makers were not entirely dependent on what the numbers were saying. Today, it’s a much different story.

Nowadays, we use various tools to make sure the decision-making process is accurate and reliable. SAS analytics is one such tool that is helping modern organisations; SAS, in fact, is the leader in the global data analytics market.

While SAS analytics has seen widespread adoption, organisations require a deep and sound knowledge of the platform to get the most out of their specific deployment. As it happens, SAS training can help teams attain that kind of knowledge.

In this post, let’s explore how SAS training is helping companies create a robust decision-making framework, helping them make more strategic, future-focused decisions.

SAS training deepens your knowledge of analytics deployments

Although SAS’ data analytics tools have been adopted by many modern businesses, they are not used or deployed in the same way. Every deployment is different since the needs and requirements of one company will not be the same as the next.

That said, data analysts need to have a deep understanding of the entire SAS ecosystem of tools and their capabilities—even if they don’t use all of them—to leverage the full potential of their specific deployment.

SAS training programmes help data analytics professionals learn about the various SAS tools and their capabilities, helping them acquire a deeper, more rewarding knowledge of the popular analytics platform.

SAS training helps you produce and enjoy more accurate insights

Although SAS analytics tools can produce actionable insights at a steady rate, they need high-quality data sets to do so. 

That’s why data analytics professionals need to commit to data preparation—the process of cleaning, wrangling, organising and formatting data—to make it ready to be ingested into the analytics infrastructure. 

That said, data preparation can be hard to execute and takes a considerable amount of time to complete. In fact, according to recent statistics, data scientists spend 76% of their time preparing data. 

With SAS training, data scientists can learn techniques and tricks that reduce the time spent on data preparation and help them focus their efforts more on generating quality and accurate insights to support better decision-making.

SAS training ensures your SAS analytics platform works smoothly

Businesses need to manage and maintain their deployment at an optimal level to produce insights at a steady rate. SAS administration helps organisations do that.

While SAS administration may sound simple, it is anything but—administrators need to know how to identify bugs via troubleshooting and what actions to take to address these bugs and vulnerabilities.

Without these capabilities, the effectiveness and accuracy of your SAS analytics platform can be compromised, affecting how useful your decision-making insights are.

Ineffective SAS administration can also lead to lengthy system outages, prohibiting the production of insights.

The good news is that SAS training can help administrators learn critical processes like troubleshooting, bug fixing, and general management of their deployment to ensure smooth operations and reduce system downtime.

Leverage the full potential of SAS analytics with SAS training

Organisations around the world are using SAS analytics to support their data-backed decision-making processes because SAS provides a comprehensive set of tools that produces useful insights.

That said, organisations can optimise their decision-making processes by leveraging the full potential of their deployment with SAS training.

Make the most of SAS training to improve your decision-making capabilities today.