Getting an SAP job

August 12th, 2008 Posted in Career

The most popular SAP-related question I see is some variant on “How do I get into SAP?” The promise of a rich career with the world’s largest enterprise applications company attracts a lot of interest from university graduates, IT professionals seeking to switch fields and consultants eager for recurring engagements.

Rather than offering specific advice, because evryone’s position is different, I’d suggest that you educate yourself about the various business and technical contexts in which SAP operates. The more you learn, the more you’ll learn which part of SAP appeals to you, or even whether SAP is right for you in the first place. It’s an investment that may get you into the SAP door, and it will keep paying off, as you will get into the habit of staying up to date with SAP developments.

An excellent resource to help you build your SAP intelligence is SearchSAP, who have an excellent catalog of podcasts containing valuable advice and direction for SAP job seekers. If you don’t have the time to listen to them immediately, download them and listen to them on a commute to work or on a plane. Some notable recent podcasts for SAP job seekers:

  • SAP and SOA: Want to know how SOA is changing the SAP careers field? Listen to SAP expert Rabi Jay explain how SOA is changing SAP’s product set and rewarding particular skills over others.
  • The SAP skills shortage: What it means for you. The good news for SAP job seekers is that SAP demand is higher than qualified supply. Some areas of SAP are more open than others. In this podcast, David Foote explains which SAP areas are paying the most and which areas are not as hot.
  • SAP explains its certification program: SAP offers three levels of certification. Learn what the levels are, why SAP thinks certification is important for hiring managers and why getting certified by SAP partners instead of by SAP may be pointless.
  • How can ABAP developers survive in a NetWeaver era?: ABAP is SAP’s proprietary development language, but recent moves towards SOA (particularly in NetWeaver) have offset the once-unchallengeable status of ABAP. Developers should listen to this podcast to learn how to polish their skills for the SAP jobs of tomorrow.

Another extremely good resource is the SAP Developer Network. This is designed for practicing SAPers, so the Getting Started link is about getting started in the Software Devloper Network, but some usefull posts include:

  • Trial Versions of SAP Software: How to obtain and install the free trial versions of SAP software. The best news is that these will run in Virtual machines, so you can install several different versions (Linux, Windows, DB2, maxdb) and experiement.
  • SDN Subscriptions. SDN subscriptions offer on-line convenience, lower-cost, term-based access to the educational content, SAP software and the related services, designed for peopel and organisations who know they need SAP knowledge, but don’t have access to (or can’t afford) full time class room training and consulting.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • We have a wealth of SAP Trend data and freelance opportunities over at oDesk that might supplement the suggested resources in this article. Just check out www.odesk.com/trends/sap.
    - Daryl
    oDesk
  • How did you get your start doing sap abap developer work, and what career moves did you make to get to your current position?

    Do you need a particular educational background?
  • Actually, I'm not an ABAP developer. I'm a BASIS (old skool name) / Netweaver Technical (new name) Consultant. While I've been in IT for over 30 years, I've only been doing serious R3 / Netweaver BASIS work for about 8 years or so. While the other 22 years have little or no direct bearing on my R3 work, the experience - in mainframe systems programming, performance management and database administration - was a very good fit for the role of BASIS administrator of the old R2 systems (very basically, it was a 'green screen' mainframe version of SAP, that was proted to UNIX client server architechture as the original R3 2.x release).

    As this was phased out, I moved over to implementing and supporting R3 and Netweaver systems. In also made sure that employers knew I was interested in R3, by keeping up with industry news and demonstrating that I knew what was out there in SAP products and services.

    I still try to keep up to speed with all things BASIS, in as many releases as possible; for example I probably spend 10 - 15 hours a week supporting systems that are out of support for one or more of the operating system, DBMS, or SAP release. However, i also keep my hand in by installing and running the SAP provided trial installations..
  • Hi Martin,

    I couldn't agree more. My background is similar to your but I went the Analyst programmer path and there has been more than one occasion where I have been grateful for learning my trade under sysprogs who cherished every operation and every slice of memory.

    Things aren't so different these days in SAP land and the premise that being a competent programmer is far more valuable than being able to code still holds true. Language is essentially irrelevant in the end ... that's what manuals are for,

    These days I run data conversion teams and I will always take programmers and techno-functional guys that understand business processes over those that simply "know ABAP" or "know LSMW".

    I liked reading your comment.

    Damian Cox
  • Great post. You're right, most look for specific advice with too many variables left unanswered. I like your approach. Thanks for the resources too.
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