Going Beyond the Basics for ERP Career Advancement Tips

If you’re an advanced ERP consultant, you’ve probably been to several industry events. However, if you did not take the time to lay out some guidelines for yourself regarding what you would like to accomplish, you may have sleepwalked through the event.

If you want to get to the higher echelons of an ERP career, you have to expand what you do at events. Stop hanging out with the same crowd of people. Don’t go back to your hotel at the end of the day. Hang out at the bar, socialize with new people, and get out of your comfort zone. You don’t need to have a specific goal in mind. Maybe you’ll pick up some unexpected tips, hear about siebel contact jobs, or learn something about an ERP company’s new product or strategic direction. The point is that, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll stay where you’ve always been. Events are a great place to encounter other people, viewpoints, and opportunities that you may have phased out until now.

There are many good consultants with successful track records, an admiring circle of clients and recruiters, and friends in the industry. However, there are only a few good consultants with broad industry name recognition. Be one of these consultants—it’ll propel your career to the next level.

Of course, it’s hard work! Becoming a thought leader, and getting your name recognized by the industry, means writing books, writing columns and/or blogs on respected technology sites, answering questions on the SAP Developer Network, and generally being active on the Internet and in social media related to your area of your expertise. Think about hooking up with writing partners if you’re longer on domain knowledge than on writing skill, and don’t leap directly into blogging or writing articles without determining a style and focus for yourself. If you don’t put your best work out there in its best form, you won’t be a thought leader at all, so don’t treat this as a side project.

The true hallmark of an advanced ERP consultant is a lifelong commitment to learning. The question is, what’s the best learning strategy for a consultant at your level? College degrees, certifications, online courses—there are too many options in the market these days to counsel a specific direction.

But one piece of advice that may help is for you to think beyond the level of impressing people with your credentials and choose an education path that gives you practical skills for an ERP job. Given your work experience, few recruiters or hiring managers will look for another bullet point in the education section of your resume; at this point, your commitment to education is largely for yourself. Be honest about your functional and technical gaps, and see if you can fill them with education. Be ambitious about new skills you want to learn, and find the right venue to acquire this expertise. Learn to progress, not to impress.

No matter your level of achievement, you will always find that your peers follow the famous 80/20 Pareto rule. If you need brushing up on your economics, Pareto’s rule implies, among other things, that 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the people. In every company or industry group of sufficient size, you’ll find one-fifth of the people truly superior to their peers.

How does this elite group form? The simplest answer is: it does what the slackers don’t. So what should you do? For one, take close note of what most of your peers are not doing, and do that. If they’re not going to industry events, you should go. If they’re not returning emails within an hour, you should. The possibilities are endless, but you get the point. You can build a profile for professional success based solely on what the statistical dead-end of 80 percent can’t, or won’t, do. SAP consultants and Oracle consultants, take heed!

Woody Allen once said that 99 percent of success was just showing up. You’d be surprised how many people don’t heed this basic advice. Even advanced ERP consultants fail to show up, which in our times means not just being at the right location but also returning calls and emails as quickly as possible and relentlessly chasing down every opportunity.

Following up sounds like a passive, administrative activity, but it is highly strategic, if only because it differentiates you from the 80% of people who are less committed to the logistics of their SAP careers or Oracle careers. Here are some basic tips to make you a master of following up: get a BlackBerry, and return every email within an hour. Answer all your phone calls, and set up call forwarding whenever you’re on the road. Call or email your recruiter regularly. Ask colleagues about opportunities. Bottom line: no matter how experienced you are, never assume that work is going to come to you. Grab it by filling your opportunity pipeline. That’s what following up is really about.

Consulting and management are different career tracks. However, some ERP consultants find themselves eyeing the management track after they have already committed to consulting. This is a mistake, for two reasons. The first reason is that most junior consultants have no business thinking about management, as they're simply not ready for it. The second reason is that senior consultants have acquired a lifetime of habits and preferences that may not easily be accommodated in the management ranks.

You shouldn't be discouraged from wanting to go into management, but you should make the decision as early as possible. Management and consulting are profoundly different career paths and life paths, and you will save yourselve some trouble if you decide between one or the other as early as you can. Just as project-hopping is a bad idea in consulting, career-hopping isn't a long-term path to personal or professional success.

As an advanced ERP consultant, you have more leeway to turn your knowledge into products. If you know a lot about a particular product or vertical, write a book about it and self-publish on Amazon. Royalty rates for self-publishing are higher than ever and, best of all, you can sell books while you sleep. It’s passive, recurring revenue that can make up for times of famine in your consulting work. Also, while books are an excellent way to productize your knowledge, think bigger. The opportunities offered by social media are extremely diverse: you can create downloadable PDF guides, e-learning webcasts, and Flash presentations and host them on a website (such as Spinact.com) that serves as a marketplace for consultant products. However you proceed, the bottom line is to start thinking of yourself as a content provider as well as a service deliverer; it’ll add another dimension or two to your earning power and pump up your recognition in the marketplace.

As an advanced ERP consultant, you spend a lot of time in planes and airports and, let’s be honest, you probably misuse a lot of that time. Sure, transit is boring, and we’re all addicted to checking our email, playing solitaire, and the like; but it’s also an opportunity to read, especially once you’re in the air. Put your laptop away and crack open a book. It doesn’t have to be a 600-page SAP technical manual; it can be a book about management, the industry your new client works in, a blog or even a novel. Reading books gets your brain working in ways that web surfing doesn’t, and it forms an ideal contrast to the decontextualized, bite-sized communiqués we have become accustomed to reading online. So next time you’re in the air, make an investment in your brain: read a book for the context, detailed information, and cognitive development it gives you.

Remember what Wayne Gretzky said about his skating ability? He said he skated to where the puck was going to be, not where it was. That’s a short and accurate description of what it means to stay ahead of the curve in advancing your ERP career. The beginning and intermediate candidate tends to skate to where the puck is, but the truly advanced ERP consultant can read the writing on the wall and acts accordingly. Bear in mind that this skill is not at all about picking the hot module/product of the moment, but understanding the ERP companies’ strategic directions and adjusting to them. For example, advanced SAP consultants knew that Solution Manager was going to become more important in SAP’s process-oriented world, and they prepared accordingly. Someone looking for a Peoplesoft job would plan on learning how the company shift affected the products. They’re going to benefit from that foresight for at least some years to come. Now it’s your turn to develop a strategic understanding of your ERP company of choice and skate to where the puck is going to be.

This may seem like frivolous advice to road warriors and other workaholics, but it works. The ERP consulting industry is full of obsessive, hard-working types who mope when they’re off a project and work frantically when they’re on. You simply crave work, and that’s understandable. But if you haven’t taken a holiday in a couple of years, now’s the time. By the way, a holiday means you leave your laptop and your BlackBerry behind, unhook from the grid, and go somewhere relaxing for at least two weeks. Anything else isn’t a holiday. When you come back, you’ll be refreshed and perhaps obtain a new perspective on your career. Even if nothing life-changing happens, you can bet you’re worn out from all those late nights and plane flights, and your body could use the energy that a vacation inevitably brings. So be good to yourself, start making your arrangements, and come back tanned and ready for your next adventure.