Achieving ERP Career Success in Difficult Times Tips

ERP consultants like to be judged on their experience and history of results. But what’s an interviewer to do with three candidates of roughly comparable backgrounds in ERP projects? Chances are that a good interview will make the difference. The bad news is that many consultants haven’t mastered the art of interviewing well, because they haven’t had to. They may have cut their teeth in the ERP boom years, when SAP jobs were legion and interviews were a mere formality. Today, the competition for ERP jobs is fierce, the number of qualified consultants is higher than ever before, and clients can be as picky as they want to be.

Fortunately, giving a good interview is really quite easy. Here are some tips on what to do:

1. Prepare. Know the firm, its business model, and its mission, and how you can add value to it.

2. Don’t talk prematurely about money. Emphasize that the quality of the professional opportunity is what interests you.

3. Be very specific about your past successes: implementation delivery times, problems resolved, etc.

4. Don’t talk too fast! This is a mistake many people make when they get nervous, and it can throw a whole interview off-balance. Relax and take your time in answering questions. Breathe. If English isn’t your first language, use a cadence and vocabulary with which you are comfortable.

5. Ask strategic questions designed to show off your knowledge of the company’s challenges, and of the ERP project of which you’ll be a part. When the interview is over, express your interest in the job. Don’t leave the interviewer with any doubt about your interest.

6. Send a thank-you note, within 48 hours. This is an old-fashioned professional courtesy that can work wonders.

Following these tips can set you apart from the pack, and help you land the ERP jobs you want.

Can certification improve your credentials as an ERP professional? It depends. Vendor-offered ERP certifications, such as SAP BPX, and any larger industry certification that mark you as a subject matter expert—in, for example, manufacturing or the supply chain—can provide a solid differentiator if your implementation experience is not an extensive as you’d like it to be.

Even consultants with more experience should be aware that adding the right certification can round out a resume. There are three key factors:

1. Be discriminating. Some ERP certifications have a reputation for being solid; others don’t. Do your research. Ask recruiters, other consultants, and industry organizations about the reputation of your target certifications before committing the money. Learn the details. For example, direct-from-SAP certification is far more important in SAP recruitment than third-party certification.

2. Emphasize learning. A certification should be part of an ongoing commitment to growing your knowledge, not a fast attempt to pad your resume. If you really are committed to learning, find a certification that requires you to learn something genuine.

3. Focus. Find a certification that digs deep into a specific area. This will help you to stand out, and to communicate the value of the certification to a client.

4. Go to the vendor first. If you want to know how Oracle certifications impact Oracle recruitment, call the vendor and press for hard details. The same goes for SAP recruitment. As a consultant, you're a valuable part of the ERP ecosystem, and you have the right to ask the firm representing you how hiring managers view their certifications.

Just when we thought blogging and LinkedIn were the last social networking tools we’d need, along came Facebook and Twitter. Tomorrow, too, there will be other social networking tools—and you’d better know how to use them. In a tough, crowded ERP services marketplace, visibility is king, and mastering the suite of popular social networking tools will raise your profile in ways that few other strategies can.

Social networking is also a brand issue. You want to have a reputation as a cutting-edge, clued-in professional who can be easily found, tracked, and interacted with online. To the extent that you don’t social network, you’ll be seen as a curmudgeon, or as an old-fashioned consultant who may have fallen behind the pace of modern business. Even if nothing substantive comes out of social networking, it radically raises your hipness quotient, especially when so many senior consultants are simply lost in this world.

If you need a guide, ask your school-age kids or more plugged-in peers how to get started. The time investment is limited, and the potential rewards are great.

If you don’t think business writing skills play a huge part in ERP careers, consider the following:

1. You are only as good as your resume; indeed, until you get an interview, you ARE your resume. Do you know how to craft an attention-getting but not gimmicky resume? A lot of writing skill goes into the best resumes.
2. If you want to be seen as a thought leader, you have to be able to publish viewpoints and analyses in the media and other high-profile outlets. If you can’t express yourself properly, whether it’s in a blog post or a viewpoint, the marketplace won’t accord you the respect you deserve.
3. With the ERP slowdown, you may have to go into business development mode, which includes sending out e-mails and letters to prospect for work. The better your writing skills, the more chances you have of impressing people who are not yet familiar with you and your work.

The first big waves of ERP adoptions were in Europe and North America. The next frontiers are Asia-Pacific and South America. There are billions of dollars of new ERP business in the pipeline in those countries, and consultants with command of the local languages may have a leg up in the job hunt. There are also plenty of companies in these geographies offering Siebel jobs and PeopleSoft contract jobs driven by older installs.

Given the extremely hectic lifestyle of the consultant, we’re not asking you to start learning new languages; however, if you already have some personal background in languages like Spanish and Chinese, keep in mind that you can leverage this knowledge for ERP work abroad. English is still the lingua franca in this market, but demonstrating a little linguistic flair can wow your interviewers and bring you closer to end users in these new geographies.

The next time you’re on the road, maybe you should try Rosetta Stone software to brush up on a strategic language. It could make all the difference in your next engagement.

Any long-lasting ERP career is poised between two extremes: becoming really good at something that you do over and over, and staying just ahead of the marketplace. If you’re always trying to find the next hot thing in ERP, you won’t give yourself the time and focus necessary to build up a solid foundation of expertise first. But if you never learn new tricks, you might find yourself lapped by the marketplace.

The solution is to add a small number of new ERP niche competencies every couple of years. Don’t go by what’s hot at the moment, but what has the potential to last. For example, analytics and business intelligence (BI) are currently promising specialties given companies’ interest in squeezing maximum value from their existing investments. Lots of future recruitment in SAP is going to be driven by BI, especially in the wake of the Business Objects acquisition. If you're already experienced in aspects of ERP that are adjacent to BI, why not pick up some expertise here and close the loop on your skill set?

In terms of Oracle recruiting, there are plenty of opportunities to be had by digging into the massive Oracle portfolio and discovering where many customers are still having pain points. Has the demise of PeopleSoft consulting companies created pent-up demand that your skills can address? Are you skilled in legacy systems that are now part of the Oracle suite? Take honest stock of your resources and see if you have what it takes to move into new modules and functionalities, whether in Oracle, SAP, or another product. If you find yourself confident and enthusiastic about adding an ERP niche specialty, go for it; if you feel it’s a real stretch for you, don’t push too hard.

Consultants are used to getting paid for providing services, but in this brave new world there are more opportunities than ever to turn services into products. There are several advantages to ‘productizing’ your knowledge:

1. Passive revenue. You can sell a product 24/7, but you can only sell your services in the context of an actual ERP engagement.
2. Many channels, many options. You can sell books on Amazon.com, technical guides on Spinact.com, or training packages from your own website. There are more distribution channels than ever, and only your creativity limits your ability to create products out of your knowledge.
3. Risk management. The more revenue you can draw from products, the less reliant you’ll be on client engagements to keep the lights on. In these tough times, we could all use additional sources of revenue for risk mitigation purposes.
4. Thought leadership. Especially in tough times, we could all use additional sources of revenue for risk mitigation purposes.

There are many major news outlets that cover ERP issues, and they can always use an expert voice—like yours—to answer ERP questions and furnish analysis. Media sites are desperate for quality content, and to attract technically-minded readers, and they can afford you a great bargain. Writing a Q&A column for a media outlet will put you in front of hundreds of thousands of readers and grow your name recognition in the marketplace. Better yet, see if you can get your blog hosted by a media outlet, and soon you may have a reputation as a thought leader.

If you can be part of the 1% of consultants who make regular, free contributions to ERP knowledge bases, you will impress future clients, add an excellent line-item to your resume, and win plenty of social capital in the community. That’s why it’s a good idea to survey all the ERP media outlets (include niche publications like SAP job sites), write to the editors, and see if you can get your content in front of their readers. Remember that you can get as granular as you like. Regardless of whether you're an SAP NetWeaver guru or a Siebel EAI expert, focus your content, and you'll improve your chances of becoming a thought leader.

Times are tough for ERP media, so anyone willing to make free contributions stands a very good at getting a high-visibility writing position.

There’s a misconception, even among consultants who ought to know better, that ERP is a purely technical exercise. In fact, it’s a business process engineering exercise. Over the course of an ERP implementation, the end user’s business processes will change, sometimes profoundly. The best consultants already know this, and have an understanding of the downstream business process changes set in motion by an ERP implementation. These consultants talk the language of business process, not code, and employers love them.

It’s time for you to become one of these consultants. Understand the entire ERP lifecycle, not just a couple of configuration scenarios. Understand how different ERP products and modules require end users to commit to different processes. Understand how some job functions (for example, in payroll) will be completely transformed by ERP, whereas others will be left alone.

Of course, you don’t have to learn these things, but then you won’t impress your clients. You won’t have the reputation of being the go-to consultant who can help explain things to line-of-business users and managers alike. You’ll just be another techie doing configurations in a corner somewhere. The very best consultants know business process engineering and the entire ERP lifecycle. If you want to compete on their level, learn what they know.

No matter how far the Web has come, ERP is still a face-to-face business. Going to conferences, industry events, and other get-togethers will help you make and maintain connections that will lead to ERP work. The last thing a consultant who isn’t working should do is stay home. If you have the funds, hit the big industry events in your area, and don’t be shy about asking for discounts. If you have any pull as a blogger, or can get media credentials from a media outlet, you might be able to ease the financial strain.

If you’re traveling to ERP events in order to network, here are some tips to maximize your time:

1. Build your brand. Hand out business cards, direct people to your blog, make intelligent contributions to forum discussions.
2. Take the pulse of your industry. Any major event outlines unfolding ERP challenges and opportunities. Is everyone talking about business processes? Integration challenges? Is a new product release or merger driving SAP openings? Try to notice the high-level themes, and understand where your expertise fits in.
3. Maximize after-conference time. People on conference travel are easily bored and like to have a good time afterward. This is a good opportunity to get invited along on dinners and other get-togethers where you can find yourself getting a lot closer to potential clients than you would on the conference floor.