It’s been an exciting time for SAP career content at JonERP.com. This week, I announced my SAP Career Outlook 2010 series I wrote for the Career Center at SAP Community Network. These two white papers are probably the most important thing I have written about SAP careers this in a decade, so I encourage you to check them out (they are up on SCN also).

One of the problems with writing SAP career content is that "one size does not fit all." Each SAP career path needs to be fleshed out. Sometimes the best way to do that is through a collaboration with another expert. Enter SAP Mentor Tony de Thomasis of the Australia Post. Tony saw my two part video series on "SAP Career Planning" I had posted on SCN - videos that capture some of the themes of the white paper series. Tony then took those videos a step further with a fabulous Prezi on the career path for Basis-NetWeaver pros. I then raised the stakes of collaboration again, by taping four commentary tracks through Tony’s Prezi slides. You can see these in this blog post.

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I’m posting a handful of my favorite videos from 2009 to close out the year. One highlight, without a doubt, was this shoot with Ann Rosenberg. To get to the bottom of the impact of BPM on SAP’s tools, skills, and consulting approaches, I managed to get the "Goddess of BPM," Ann Rosenberg herself, otherwise known as the Global Practice Owner for Business Process Management at SAP, to sit down for a live video shoot at SAP TechEd Phoenix. We shot the nine minute video on my flipcam and I thought the sound quality was very good, given that we were just outside the Community Clubhouse, where people were talking it up as usual. I consider BPM to be one of the most important skill areas inside of SAP, but it brings with it a great deal of hype as well. We got into those issues during this video.

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To say the SAP job market is competitive right now would be an understatement, so it’s time to revisit the subject I posted on late last year: mistakes SAP job seekers make and how to avoid them. The first mistake? “Chasing dollars, not skills.” The latest mistake? Trying to make more than one SAP job change at a time. To understand how this works, I’ll draw on emails I receive from frustrated SAP job seekers who are trying to improve their strategy.

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I write about the SAP Business Process Expert (BPX) skill set because to stay marketable, we have to look beyond the present. SAP professionals don’t want to miss out on skills that might someday make the difference between landing a job or not. One of the most important aspects of the BPX skills profile is gaining experience in “next generation” process modeling tools. No, we don’t see this kind of tool experience as a required skill on many SAP job orders today. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t understand how these tools might fit into what we need to know.

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On Tuesday, December 7, I had the opportunity to sit in on a webcast on the BI/BO product that was open to SAP Mentors. We had the chance to ask questions on the roadmap from Ingo Hilgefort, who is himself an SAP Mentor and a key player instrumental in the integration of BI with Business Objects even prior to the acquisition. Ingo also conducted the Business Object track at the Community Day events in Las Vegas and Berlin. For me, this was a chance to see how SAP had sharpened its view of the BI/BO future since the BO Summit I attended in Boston in August. I wrote a longer piece on BI/BO skills transitions after that event.

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On July, 26, I conducted a podcast interview with Kent Sanders, Senior Technology Architect for CSC Consulting, about the beginning of the end for the traditional R/3 Basis Consultant, and how to make the skills transition to “NetWeaver Engineer.” This was one of my favorite podcasts; Kent did a terrific job of breaking down the practical steps necessary to stay on the cutting edge of the technical side of SAP. Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I get back from Sapphire or TechEd, one story remains a constant: What are we going to do about the so-called SAP skills shortage? Or, if we want to push SAP on this a little bit, we could say, "What is SAP doing about the skills shortage?"; I have a problem with this line of thinking. Not because the skills demand isn’t real - it obviously is. But a simplistic view of the "skills shortage" doesn’t serve anyone in the SAP ecosystem very well. Read the rest of this entry »

I probably field as many questions about SAP Master Data Management (MDM) as any other emerging area of SAP. There are two ways to assess the viability of an SAP skill. One is to consider a tool like MDM as part of a broader SAP skill set. The other way is to consider MDM as a possible consulting focus and specialty. In this SAP career blog entry, I’ll consider both aspects of MDM in terms of its "skills marketability." Our bottom line is: how good does SAP MDM look on a resume? Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of the hardest questions you could possibly ask me, because SAP is so vast that there is never one tool that will suit every SAP consultant. The best approach is to assess your current skill set, figure out where SAP is headed with its new eSOA architecture, and make sure you bridge that “skills gap” before you get left behind. But having said that, you asked the question and I’m going to try to give you a good answer. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the years, I have published some big interviews on SAP consulting that have disappeared from the Internet. One of the benefits of being a JonERP.com reader is being able to get access to these exclusive interviews again. One of my favorites, my 2002-2004 interview and correspondence with NetWeaver Portals expert Pat McCarthy, has now been reposted. In addition to a great view of the emerging Enterprise Portals market, there is some timeless advice on keeping on top of your skill set in this interview. In this blog entry, we’ll review some of the most important consulting advice from this piece. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I published a piece on "SAP Skills You Want to Have" for SearchSAP.com. The complete version of that article is now available exclusively on JonERP.com. This article has generated some interesting feedback. It’s important to note that the focus of this piece is NOT "what’s hot" in SAP. That’s a slightly different question and I’ll do a separate piece on that. The focus of "SAP Skills You Want to Have" is a bit more forward-thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I got this excellent question from an SAP XI consultant. He wanted to know how to position his XI skills going forward, in the context of SAP’s eSOA strategy. Clearly, eSOA is central to SAP’s product vision going forward, so we could ask ourselves the same question of any number of SAP products. But for this time around, let’s focus on XI. Read the rest of this entry »

One common theme on the JonERP.com web site is how to transition your SAP skills in the NetWeaver and eSOA era. A big challenge here is figuring out the timing of the skills changes that are in the works. Change your skill set too soon, and you are ahead of the curve with few projects to choose from. Wait too long to make your skills transition, and you have fallen behind. From the back of the pack, it’s hard to catch up. So what’s an SAP consultant to do? Read the rest of this entry »

One of the hottest topics at SAP TechEd 2007 was the changing nature of the SAP developer skill set. It’s easy to see why people care so much about this topic: SAP customers don’t want to find themselves with a development team that lacks the skills to implement the latest SAP functionality, and SAP programmers are facing enough challenges without having to worry that their skills will no longer be needed on project sites. So what’s the latest on the future of ABAP? Read the rest of this entry »

Almost as soon as SAP’s acquisition of Business Objects (BO) was announced, the emails started pouring in. All kinds of SAP consultants, including those who were seriously involved in BW/BI or those who were looking to get involved, were concerned: how would this acquisition affect their career path? To be honest, I never truly understood these concerns. Read the rest of this entry »

The question of what the SAP market will look like five years from now is a really important one. Even though we are making project choices one at a time, those choices need to be informed by a broader career strategy. A big part of that strategy is having a good handle on where SAP is headed. You don’t want to be working in one direction when SAP is ultimately going in another. Of course, there is a catch - there is always a catch. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been hearing from a number of ABAP programmers about the potential of XI programming. I guess we should start by updating terminology and calling XI by its new name PI (which stands for Process Integration). Of course, the question any developer wants to know is: can my position be outsourced? The answer is good news and bad news. Read the rest of this entry »

There are still some bread and butter Basis positions out there, though they are harder to come by. The most successful Basis consultants have a little "edge" to their skills, a bit of technical sizzle beyond classic system admin and DBA functions. Even some basic BW training is a good first step towards expanding that core Basis toolkit. But of course the big thing is moving from Basis into a NetWeaver-based skill set. Read the rest of this entry »