Beware of "SAP Hot Skills" Lists:
A Disclaimer and Tips Sheet You Should Read Before Checking Out My SAP Hot Skills Lists
by Jon Reed, JonERP.com

By popular demand, I have relented and finally started publishing lists of hot SAP skills. I have published a list of "SAP Skills You Want to Have," a ranking of the SAP Functional Modules, a list of Hot SAP Technical Skills, an SAP Industry Solutions skills ranking, and there are more lists to come.

Lists are fun, and they can be informative, but they are like junk food and not to be taken too seriously. Hot skills lists do not take the place of a well-balanced diet of solid career planning.

One of the most frequent questions I receive is how the SAP-Business Objects acquisition is going to affect job requirements. Whether it's experienced SAP BW/BI consultants who are looking to stay on track, or folks who see the BO acquisition as an opportunity to move into a new area of SAP, there is plenty of interest in how BI-plus-BO will play out. Along with that interest comes a fair degree of confusion. It's not that easy to put the two together on paper and figure out where the opportunities are going to be. (You can see my archived live Tweets from the August 2008 SAP BO Summit here)

Site Editor's Note: This article includes SAP-approved screen shots of Business Objects product functionality and roadmaps.

Jon Reed notes: One of the most interesting events at Sapphire was a panel I took part in that looks at SAP skills demand. Since the report we were talking about looked beyond SAP, I decided to write this piece for a broader ERP audience - but most of the examples in here are SAP-specific. View panel replay: you can now view the replay of the Sapphire 2008 "Competing on Talent" panel (right click on the lnk to save this 225K Windows .asx audio/video file onto your computer, then open the file to play.)

Some ERP consultants prefer blue (SAP), some prefer red (Oracle). But there's one thing they all have in common: a desire to keep their skills marketable in a rapidly changing market. This raises an interesting question: are there "mega skills" that transcend individual applications? Are there skills that all ERP consultants can aspire to?

Jon Reed's New Introduction, April 2008: One of my most-discussed articles about SAP in the ‘90s was a piece called "The Pros and Cons of SAP Configuration Skills." A good portion of this article eventually found its way into the SAP Consultant Handbook. As I was compiling material for the JonERP.com web site, I took a fresh look at this piece, which is no longer available online. I decided to republish it because it has quite a bit of relevance to the current discussion we are having about the SAP Business Process expert and how the SAP functional skill set is evolving.