frustrated?
Written by admin on March 1st, 2010fake SAP resumes flood the market, creating an artificially high bar, even for people honestly working in SAP
Have you been trying to get a job in SAP with little or no success? Have you noticed that freshers are claiming 6 years of SAP experience, and therefore even experienced consultants with 5 years of legitimate experience aren’t being considered for jobs?
Please share your experience:
I believe that one can become fully trained and qualified to contribute successfully on an SAP implementation in far less than 5 years. But you have to have the right sort of training. And you have to have a strategy to address the “Catch-22″ in the marketplace. Perhaps most importantly, you have to be going after the right skills. I wouldn’t be studying MM, SD, or FI if I was new to SAP.
So how do you move beyond the Catch-22?
If you’re not familiar with the famous book by Joseph Heller, by “Catch-22,” I mean the following:
1. You can’t get a job working in SAP without experience.
2. You can’t get experience in SAP without getting a job.
Please share your thoughts and experience!
1
PM
What module should I be study if I am new to SAP?
1
PM
I have been associated in SAP Implementation Project at SABIC closely worked with Consultants ATOS Origin as SAP Training Coordinator and see SAP training is not a simple training just putting in some courses. One of the most important & critical task is the Job-Role-Mapping later end usrs are put in training and authorized after completion of it. There are Consultants, Power Users & End Users levels. Just after working in a portion of SAP then claiming ourselves a Consultant or PU is not honest practice. This awareness required at companies level who are hiring people. Good Luck!
1
PM
I have experiance in a different ERP
but I m also working on SAP,does my previous experiance count.
1
PM
I’m also curious to know your suggestions of which module would be best to study if one is new to SAP. What order of learning the modules do you recommend?
2
AM
I have studied SAP BW but am not able to find a Job in SAP since the past 1.5 years. Every call I get they are asking me for experience.
I am fed up..
2
AM
Congratulations, you are one of the few asking this kind of questions. And this is very important for everybody in the industry. There should be some standard practices for this things, as we got standards for the technical part of the game.
2
PM
Well Jim, there are liers in every single part of this big world.
But there is a very simple vay to verify the real world experience if you are an experienced recruiter:
1 - Check ALL the references in the companies and projects where the candidate say that has been working, tipically a good SAP consultant around 40 years old and 10 or 15 years experience has participated in more than 20 verificable diferent projects, some long duration, other short assignments.
2 - Check ALSO other people that work in the mentioned projects in the resume, not only the people referenced in the CV, this is easy to do today because the major part of the SAP professionals are register in linkedin and probably they share the same mail corporative server after the “@”, then, search related people is part of the duties of a good and competent recruiter.
3 - Give the candidate a 5 days test period, for exampled if you are hiring a SAP CRM with 5 years experience assign a complex task that can be achieved in one week, like config Business Partners or config Set types and Products, or perform the replication between BI and R/3 , the real verifiable work is the best experience test.
4 - Telephone interviews ( in my experience ) means nothing, all the people is good in the other side of the telephone line.
Well, good luck.
Exequiel Lopez
SAP ABAP Senior Consultant
SAP CRM Senior Consultant
SAP BSP / Web Dynpro Senior Consultant
Mails : exequiel@adinet.com.uy exequiel.lopez@gmail.com
Skype : exequiel@adinet.com.uy exequiel.lopez@gmail.com
Web : http://www.linkedin.com/in/exequiel
2
PM
I think there are to many SAP consultants;-). The ABAP Stack and ERP are legacy … and the combination of process consultant + little ABAP knowledge is outdated.
The combination of both is still welcome for maintainenance because SAP ERP will not so simple get rid of ABAP stack. While an itab is loaded other systems based on plain java execute a bunch of business transactions … ABAP stack is legacy and will be legacy because it has never been something differnt. I like ABAP but it does not scale enough as it should … and what remains is process knowledge in the end.
@Dhaval–> To late sorry, the hype is over. Learn SAP BI and wait if there is another one. I don’t believe.
With SAP training and study and no practice in Warehousing and larger IT you are off topic. We will see if The BI as well as SAP BI as product will become as strong as ERP … not sure and not so early.
SAP BWs are very stable and technological issues are solved for the majority of the BWs…
How to break up the problem of getting a job without experience ….
One of the components must die. The moment the customer is ready to pay for a Java SAP developer + a process only consultant with good customizing knowledge you get them all on the same road. But this will kill lot of consultants that have the little advantage of knowing little ABAP.
Mike
2
PM
I went to take a SAP ABAP course to change my work environment and sometimes think it was a bad money investment… nobody wants to hire a senior like me (52yo) with no experience to demonstrate, maybe i won’t get the certification because of it; i mean, why spent more money if i’ll never get a job?
2
PM
I have been working on an old CRM platform (ClarifyCRM) for about 10 years. I have been tried to transfer to SAP CRM, but it is quite hard to get a chance for it. So do you have good suggestion?
3
AM
I have many years of ERP Experience in Accpac & Syspro, was the IT & Communications Manager for the SA branch of a large corporation, but this means nothing. Due to restructuring I was retrenshed and when applying for a job that will give me the opportunity to learn SAP or work for a Company that could send me for training. I’ve been trying for 5 years to get into a particular company that use to be on Accpac and then changed to SAP … Having to settle for a job that pays a lot less than what I use to earn because I don’t have SAP… I am currently the Fianace Super User and System Administrator for a Pastel to Sage x3 Conversion Project. SAP Training is very expensive and I’ve even tried applying at SAP SA to see if they would employ me and train me at the same time.. No such luck! I am in a catch 22. What can I do?
3
AM
Agree entirely with this, but would like to add a couple of other problems these people cause:
1 - they prove their skills by having relatives verify their experience.
2 - as if this is needed right now, they artificially reduce the rates consultants can charge down to their levels.
3 - if they get onto a project team they “learn on the job” earn while they do it and leave the project in tatters.
3
AM
I had been working in SAP Japan and attended to training in SAP Germany. I know that many can not do it. But I can do SAP. my resume is honest but and my clients in past know my works. I did know more damages from someone’s works. I really understand what you said.
4
AM
@Exequiel … Agree …
Now back why things are this way…
Knowing ABAP means nothing, even knowing a programming language means nothing. Understanding the business and the system — in this case ..
SAP is sold with 3 mayor arguments:
a) It is software make and buy - ok agree
b) A SAP consultant always brings a solution
c) There is always one around that solves the problem
–> Game of the professionals.
a) Agree
b) Yes and no.
On BW I’m a lot more happy with a guy that understands warehousing.
On modules, yes you need lots of experience because people must know the old ABAP and escpecially must have been grown up with the modules .. remember Financals was ported from R/2 on to R/3 and has lots of denormalizations in it that are useless today but you dont get rid of the millons lines of code using syntax (This is ABAP is 4GL if you extend the statement a different implementation in the ABAP Runtime is applied … - backward compatibilty –> 25 years backward –> Pharaos programming system) –> The same problem … it is hard to get of an evil mother-in-law;-).
c) Maybe lots of guys have been told, go SAP there is always a job, make a training … in ABAP … getting to know a module is a lot harder … agree. But this depends on how big the peak in demand is. *)
So what happend. SAP Rollouts fullfill the promise escpecially on the ERP side to be refinanced via cuts of headcount in business. This promise has not been fullfilled. The salary of an SAP consultant is calculated from this … and the argument is experience.
Imho… People now realize that have invested billions of dollars into something pretty old, but works.
A SAP consultant is payed especially for customizing, knowing what does not work …, OSS patches,… applying –> and in most cases you have one chance left –> bring the change productive and it has to work.
When SAP ships something that is new (CRM the first days …;-)) nothing works, BW something new BW 1.2 nothing works, 2.x nothing worked in the beginning (became better after 2 years), BW 3.x somehow improved BW 2, BW 7.x horrible … did not work until patch 7 statred to become stable with patch 13 … –> In this scenario the SAP consultant must be in the position to debug the application and applications functionallity and provide qualified feedback.
In the meanwhile the whole SAP market is a vendor locked in authism party … a big one an expensive one but many companies rely on suppliers from this market.
So you see the problem is not knowing ABAP or knowing CRM the problem is knowing the old … and finding a silution if the problem is hard to solve or critical … and imho this is a world wide waste of intellectual potential in IT … but it was funny.
Companies want experinced guys because the have passed the cerberus know a lot about SAP and are commited because with the years they are no IT guys more a lot special leage of SAPs way to think… In this world you need years to come to the point where everyone else who has been in this business before is.
Guys you cannot come and start something from the scratch, data is taken from the ERP System and in the end you always end up having to know what is going on in there …
I don’t like the companies that force people to go for a SAP job in times of peak knowing that their chance to get a job … - this is the drawback of the recruting in high price markets.
SAP in mid range comps works without attendance. Especially those companies who modified a lot now restructure and then you need about 5 to 6 guys to run and modify a companies (divisons SAP system)where you needed 30 up to 50 before … in this market there must be at least a boom compareable to the last decade in Europe to get a chance for learning a SAP module. But what should they ship. At they moment the decade of shifting the existing to a new technology will eat up IT budgets … there is nothing left for old IT guys, or system owners they are already there.
Mike
14
AM
Jim, in fact I had experienced in ERP´s JDEdwards, SAP and Oracle. Just in JDEdwars I was as Champion leader to migrate all information since Personal software to JDE for all modules A/P, A/R, Fixed Assets, Inventory, Manufacturing and Distribution Vs General Ledger. My mean activity was create Chart of Account COA, Automatic Accounting Instruction AAI by interfaces between all modules A/P, A/R, Fixed Assets, Inventory & Manufacturing Vs G/L and match them through integrity reports once upload this information. Obviously this work was with support the IT team of the Corporate because I´m CPA. In other companies that was working I used SAP but just as inquiry all modules A/P, A/R, and Fixed Assets.
Roberto