SAP Career Advice Tips

There are many misconceptions surrounding SAP, and one of the leading ones is that the ERP skills shortage will allow just about anyone with tech skills to break into the market. This misconception is stoked by trainers, certification companies and other parties who make revenue from the dreams of SAP wannabes. In reality, you have very little chance of breaking into SAP jobs if all you have to show for yourself is a third-party certification and a few months of training on a module. Customers are looking for people with actual SAP project experience to staff their teams, and, in this environment, the quality of the potential SAP career pool just increased. There are plenty of former big-firm SAP consultants who have become independents and are raring to work. Don’t be dissuaded from trying, but be aware that the chances of breaking in to an SAP job are low, unless you first get on an implementation team as an end user, have some kind of inside connection or can really demonstrate a special credential to the interviewer.

Within the SAP community, the ABAP versus Java controversy rages hot enough to start fistfights. SAP career traditionalists think of ABAP as the canonical language of SAP development, while, in the post-Shai Agassi era, Java has taken on increasing prominence. Agassi may be gone, but Java’s here to stay. With every passing quarter, SAP is moving away from proprietary approaches toward embracing open standards and existing languages, and this approach is bringing Java to the fore. Don’t take it from us: keep your ears open at SAPPHIRE, TechEd and regional ASUG events, and you’ll hear this theme again and again from SAP executives and senior consultants who want to guide your career in SAP. In fact, CSC’s SAP Practice Manager, Pat McCarthy, Jr., devoted some of his time at a recent ASUG presentation to explaining how Java had become a more prominent part of Solution Manager and was the winning horse in SAP boardroom discussions. With that said, the existing SAP ERP application landscape is so vast and will continue to require modification and enhancement. ABAP skills will be required for the foreseeable future.

SAP consultants, we’re throwing a lot of stuff at you—if you tried to follow up on everything we suggest, you’d be busy for the rest of your life. That’s why it may help you to break down some of this SAP career advice into bite-sized chunks that you can digest over the next 18 months. To that end, here are top three action tips for that timeframe. 1. Build your business process expertise, not just by pursuing certifications such as BPX, but by learning about actual process methodology pertaining to order-to-cash, manufacture-to-inventory, etc. 2. Get on SAP SDN. This Web site is a treasure trove of SAP knowledge and can teach you just as much as a certification program. Conversely, if you’re already an expert, you should build your profile on this site; it will prove useful. 3. Solve your identity crisis. Stop thinking like someone who ‘does’ modules and start deciding what the theme of your career is. Learn to answer the question, “What is that I help end users accomplish?” and let that guide your SAP career trajectory.

Last year, SAP started offering a new certification called Business Process Expert (BPX). The writing’s on the wall—everyone in the SAP ecosystem, from the vendor itself to customers and analysts, recognizes that SAP products are business process engineering tools first and IT tools second. As a consultant, you will best serve your clients by understanding the business context of SAP, and prepare yourself to answer the following questions. Do you understand the lifecycle of a module? Do you know how to configure functionality aligned to a project plan? Do you know how laws, regulations and industry mandates are impacting your client’s vertical? Do you understand the link between IT architecture like SOA and business processes? Even if your specific business knowledge doesn’t get used on a project, you will still impress clients and consultancies alike if you demonstrate a knowledge of evolving business processes. Check out SAP’s BPX forum to keep current with the business process discussion, and your SAP consulting career will gain some longevity.

Do you find yourself flitting from job to job without wrapping up assignments? Are you always negotiating, even after you sign a contract? Do you fudge your resume? Are you so busy chasing after the next hot SAP skill that you haven’t built a stable portfolio of expertise? These are common variations of SAP career mistakes, and, while you could get away with them to some extent in the red-hot market of 1990-2007, things are different now. The SAP consulting career of today is built on professionalism and predictability, so here is some current SAP career advice: finish what you start; negotiate once, and stick to what has been agreed; always give the client the best value for their money, and try to transfer as much knowledge to them as you can; be friendly and helpful; and try to give your SAP career a theme. At the end of the day, you should be able to pursue SAP career opportunities with a strong professional reputation preceding you.

SAP is a vast domain. Even consultants who have spent years working with SAP aren’t fully aware of how much functionality it encompasses. This is good news for SAP career seekers, as there are many potential paths to success. If you already have some experience with hosted solutions, you might want to check out SAP Business One as a focus area. If you’re an old business intelligence (BI) hand, you should know that SAP’s acquisition of the Business Objects and Crystal Reports assets gives you a host of new opportunities to serve SAP customers. If you’re a functional type of person—e.g. supply chain, operations, etc.—you can find an analog for your skills in different SAP modules. If you’re starting your SAP job journey from scratch, the first step is to map what you already know, or enjoy, with what’s in SAP’s arsenal. This approach is superior to picking a module or specialization based on how ‘hot’ it is in the current market, as this can always change.

The SAP Developer Network, or SDN, is the place where over a million SAP professionals—executives, end users, developers, consultants, analysts, etc.—get together to ask questions, obtain answers, network with one another and build the SAP ecosystem’s knowledge base. Navigating through SDN isn’t easy, as there is a vast amount of content in the form of blogs, videos, documents and discussion threads, but you have to find your way through it. SDN offers something for every level of SAP career seeker. The SAP newbie will get access to training information and tips. The working SAP consultant looking out for the next SAP job will be able to network with peers and potential clients and treat SDN as an SAP job board. Finally, those in advanced SAP jobs will be able to use SDN to improve their credentials as thought leaders and to build a bigger name for themselves in the SAP community. SDN.SAP.com: use it every day, and see if your SAP career doesn’t go up a notch.

As a consultant, your SAP career path is dependent on the firms for which you work. If you’re starting out, be advised that you need to find as large a firm as possible in order to get the training you need. The largest consultancies and systems integrators have the resources and patience to train you; whereas, if you start with a smaller firm, you’ll be asked to pull your own weight a lot sooner. So, for obvious reasons, don’t expect a lot of responses if you send your entry-level resume to boutique consultancies. Tailor your job-search strategy to getting employed at one of the bigger firms. For anyone with a year or less experience in SAP, these are the firms with the best chance of hiring you. Learn about their SAP practices, talk to current and former employees and figure out what it takes to stand out in the eyes of the big boys.

In the R/3 days and before, a career in SAP used to be very modular. You learned FI/CO, MM, SD, etc. In the NetWeaver era and beyond, that’s changed. SAP is no longer organized around modules but around business processes. SAP rollouts will be organized in terms of setting up processes such as order-to-cash and manufacture-to-inventory. This doesn’t mean that all the old modular skills are useless, but it does call attention to the possibility that the SAP job description of the future will be more similar to ‘business process architecture expert’ than to ‘FI/CO expert.’ Let’s be honest—that day isn’t here yet. But you can bet your boots it’ll come. Everything from the BPX certification to the new face of Solution Manager to the tools for business process composition points to it. That’s why you should track these changes on SDN, at SAP conferences and even in the trade press, because it’ll be relevant to your SAP career before you know it.

Not too long ago, Solution Manager was a niche product that wasn’t necessary for an SAP consulting career. However, Solution Manager is rapidly coming to occupy a central place in a broader range of SAP jobs. Solution Manager 7 EhP1 is going to touch every aspect of managing SAP and creating SAP functionality. This is where you’ll handle implementation, from global rollouts to test; upgrades; change request management; solution monitoring, including both system and business process monitoring; the service desk; and deliver of SAP services. The best way to think about Solution Manager now is as the all-purpose SAP management system. That’s why you, as part of your SAP career, can’t afford to neglect this solution. Granted, there are some very technical components of Solution Manager 7 EhP1, particularly pertaining to system landscape management, and you can’t expect to cover everything in Solution Manager. However, be aware that anything you do in your SAP career has some relevance to Solution Manager, so you’d better learn more about it.