If you are a SAS professional and you're within travelling distance of SAS's UK headquarters between June 15 and 17, you should give serious consideration to attending the 2010 SAS Professionals Convention. If you only have one shot at training this year, this should be your choice. My own experience from attending past conventions and SIG barbecues is that these events offer focused, detailed information about SAS software, and they offer excellent opportunities to talk to fellow professionals (often more valuable than the sessions), in a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere.
This year's three-day conference features a keynote session from Chris Hemedinger (a senior member of the team that builds SAS Enterprise Guide & SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office, and author of the Sasdummy blog and the SAS for Dummies book). The agenda shows one day focused upon industries, another focused upon technology, and a third focused upon career development.
The conference costs £75 for all three days if you book before 24th April. You cannot get better value than that! But I didn't yet mention that SAS are also offering free usage of the "SAS Expert Channel" until the end of the year. The expert channel is a series of live web training courses.
Will I see you there?...
Established at the start of 2009, the SAS Professionals network has grown from strength to strength. In fact, the SAS UK web site has an interesting review of the benefit it delivered to SAS and its customers across 2009.
Are you aware of PBLS, the Premier Business Leadership Series? It's a business conference for business leaders organised by SAS in three continents: Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific (okay, four continents!). This year's European event is in Berlin from June 21 - 23.