In an earlier blog, I asked you to participate in CertMag/GoCertify’s Annual IT Salary survey. The response was fantastic and I’m happy to report that we made the list of the Top 75 IT certifications out of more than 900. This marks the first time SAS has been part of this esteemed list and I expect that to continue in the future.

I promised to post the highlights from the survey, but first I wanted to share another bit of good news. After making the top 75, editors at CertMag selected our most popular certification, SAS Certified Base Programmer, to be the subject of their most recent Deep Focus. The Deep Focus peels back the layers of the onion and takes a more detailed look at the data related to a specific credential.

Here’s a link to the full Deep Focus article (definitely worth a read). In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite things (sorry, still haven’t shaken off the holidays)!

• “A flat-out astonishing 36.6 percent of SAS Certified Base Programmer holders who responded to our survey are women. We’ve done a handful of Deep Focus features that didn’t include data from a single female respondent, and most of the time ratio of men to women is 9 to 1 or higher. So SAS Global Certification has tapped into something — interest from females — that a great many certification programs would love to discover.” 
• “…SAS Certified Base Programmer holders is also unusually youthful. (This makes SAS Global Certification 2 for 2 in rounding up the much-desired unicorns of the IT certification realm: first women, and now young people.) An eye-opening 14.1 percent of those surveyed are between the ages of 19 and 24, nearly 40 percent (39.4 to be exact) are between the ages of 25 and 34, and 23.9 percent are between the ages of 35 and 44. The geezers of the group are those between the ages of 45 and 54 (12. percent) and those between the ages of 55 and 64 (9.9 percent).” 
• “Full-time employment among SAS Certified Base Programmer holders is solid at 87.3 percent…”
• Almost three quarters of certification holders believe that “Becoming certified has increased my workplace productivity.”

Also, as promised, here is a link to the full Annual Salary Survey issue. Below are some highlights. As I’ve said in the past, I recommend you subscribe to the CertMag monthly publication to learn more about certification in the SAS space and across the IT spectrum. In addition to the bullets you’ll find below, there are some other interesting odds and ends around certification in general throughout the issue, be sure to read it.

• SAS took 2 spots on the Salary Survey 75.   One for Advanced Programmer and one for Base Programmer. This is out of 900 IT certifications included in the survey. 
• SAS Base Programmer made the “Hot” list of Simmering Salaries gaining a 6.5 % bump in pay over 2016. Certified IT Skills overall saw an average bump of $7000 in the US.
• SAS has two Certifications on the “Next Big Thing” List. These are SAS Certified Data Scientist and SAS Certified Advanced Programmer.

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