But here’s the problem: over the years, many SAP professionals have been burned by investing in new skills training before the jobs arrived. And in some areas, such as APO and SEM, the jobs never arrived in the quantity needed to drive a lucrative consulting market. SAP was able to fill most of the needs internally, with the help of a smaller group of specialized outside consultants with very deep experience. Aspiring SAP professionals were not able to justify their investment in this type of training. In the NetWeaver era, the problem remains: how do you stay ahead of the curve without being burned?

There’s no simple answer to that question, but the key is to find a way to evolve along with SAP, keeping the future in mind but also cultivating skills that are relevant to the present. SAP might say, for example, that folks with Enterprise SOA skills are badly needed, but how many jobs have we seen up to this point that require those skills? Not many. Not when we compare that with the amount of jobs that are now open in areas such as Financials, HR, BI/BW, and CRM. And what if IT departments find that their existing Java and web people call fill the SOA gaps pretty easily?

I ran into more than one SAP customer who told me that their existing web programmers had been able to catch on to SOA projects quickly. For those companies, the supposed "SOA skills shortage" was not a relevant factor. Making the right SAP skills choices is not as easy as resting on the admissions of SAP executives, as sharp as those comments often are.

SearchSAP.com ran a piece not long ago describing the new project roles SAP envisions that are supposedly going to be centered around these new "Age of SOA" skills sets. These roles had fancy new titles like "Consolidator," "Composer," and "Repository Keeper." It doesn’t matter what these jobs are eventually called. If they are about to become commonplace, it makes sense to start acquiring the needed skills now. But how do you do that when there are so few of these jobs available?

A quick search of Dice.com, SearchSAP.com’s job board partner, yielded exactly 0 jobs involving SAP Repository Keepers. SAP Consolidators got two hits, but one was from SAP itself and one involved financial consolidation. "Composer" did generate 33 openings in SAP, mostly involving Visual Composer - one product that the "Composer" of the future might end up using. So that role might be taking on a bit of shape, but the others are not going to put much food on the table this summer.

I didn’t even bother searching on "Disruptive Innovator," another "job of the future" from SAP that is not currently being emphasized. I am confident there are 0 listings for that one. "Business Warehouse," on the other hand, generated 2740 hits, "SAP Portals" 902, SAP CRM had 1344 hits, and SAP "FI" 1295 jobs - and that’s not including the other variations on those keywords that might have generated even more hits. So how do you get from BW Administrator to Repository Keeper? And how do you know it’s the right move to make?

In this article, I’ll try to address these skills dilemmas by breaking SAP skills down into "past, present, and future." As we go through each category, we should get a better idea of how to balance today’s skills with tomorrow’s "jobs of the future."

THE FUTURE

Functional and technical skills will converge. There’s no question that the SAP functional consultants of the future will have more technical know-how. And successful technical folks are going to need to understand the business processes that drive technical requirements. What kind of technical tools will functional consultants need to understand? They will need to grasp the web-enabled functionality in their focus area (Employee Self-Service being one obvious example in the HR area), and in the Enterprise SOA era, they will need to understand how different pre-defined business process components, such as those stored in the Enterprise Services Repository, can be assembled to perform end-to-end business functions.

There will also be a need for functional folks who understand the tools that SAP is rolling out to automate the development process, such as Visual Composer and third party modeling tools from partners ARIS and IDS Scheer. As for technical folks, the days of IT projects running wildly overbudget through self-indulgent customization are over.

IT is more strategically important than ever, but it’s also subject to more bottom line accountability than ever before. This climate rewards technical pros who have an "MBA mentality." As I have said before, "the era of the cubicle coder is over." The ability to work with functional teams, as well as supporting the needs of users through easy reporting solutions and friendly user interfaces, are all great skills to cultivate if you are on the technical side.

Configuration skills will become less important. SAP is always looking to reduce the total cost of ownership, and that means reducing consulting costs. This means automating everything that isn’t already nailed down. I had a couple of high-level SAP managers tell me in strongly-worded language that they expect the configuration piece to become less and less crucial to the functional skill set. They expect configuration to be increasingly "out of the box" for particular industries.

In addition to the emphasis on industry pre-configuration, the manual configuration that *is* needed will be subject to the same global marketplace that has changed the nature and cost of development work. With more configuration being outsourced, this skill set will become commodified. "The end of configuration" would be a major piece of news, especially when you consider that configuration skills are at the core of what makes a functional consultant marketable in today’s market.

Up to this point, functional consultants stayed marketable by mastering configuration on the latest SAP releases. This tactic will become less effective as the overall need for hands-on configuration goes down. This shift won’t happen overnight, but in the long term, functional consultants need to think in terms of delivering real business value to clients by acquiring expert-level business process and industry knowledge.

This knowledge will be the key to "adding value." There will always be some configuration work, but it will become much less central. The ability to guide clients through the entire implementation blueprint, including knowledge transfer/user training, will be more sought after than ever. I had a highly-placed SAP executive who was a key player in SOA adoption tell me that he thought configuration was going to all but disappear as a skill set.

He described future SAP skills as being in three layers, with business process know-how at the top, configuration of components in the middle, and technical architecture at the bottom. But he said that the components would be increasingly pre-configured and that the Service Oriented Architecture would allow for any customizations or enhancements that were needed without relying on either configuration or coding. Which leads us to...

Custom development will be dramatically reduced. One of the big culprits for over-extended ERP budgets is custom development gone awry. SAP is determined to reduce both the costs (and the need) for custom development. More and more, companies will use enterprise services to assemble add-on solutions with little custom work needed. And since these SOA-enabled add-ons don’t involve altering the core code base, the expenses and hassles of future upgrades will be greatly reduced.

In addition, modeling tools like Visual Composer and to some extent, new development platforms like the NetWeaver Composition Environment (CE) will empower business users to get a big jump start on their own development needs with less dependency on the technical team. SAP developers were already facing stern challenges from global outsourcing, but the automation potential of web services should further reduce the need for the classic on-site SAP developer.

However, there are definitely some ways of remaining marketable as an SAP developer. In addition to enhancing the business skills I touched on previously, mastering the latest web-based tools and techniques will be very important. The " SAP programmer of the future" is a soft skills/hard skills "hybrid" who has a mix of ABAP and Java-based skills, as well as an expert understanding of how to use SAP’s Enterprise Services Repository and xApps to build programs with re-usable components.

Ignoring "Enterprise SOA" will not be an option. For a little while longer, folks whose work doesn’t yet touch on Enterprise SOA can collect their checks and be blissfully ignorant. But that is going to change. SAP has already service-enabled its core mySAP ERP 2005 release, and by the end of this year, the service-enablement of the entire mySAP Business Suite should be complete. Furthermore, this technology is proving its worth.

Companies are finding that as long as they are on the current SAP release, that they can simply add new Web services for new business functions, and in a way that is much more affordable than custom programming ever was. In other words, SOA is not just hype. Since extending processes through the Internet is a factor in almost every area of SAP, all consultants will need to make sure their skills incorporate these new functions.

It’s important to remember that much of this innovation is about "extending the enterprise," a phrase we first used in the ‘90s before the technology was really there to justify it. Now the technology is very close, and companies want to be able to collaborate with suppliers and partners and open their systems to customers without worry about integrating the back end.

Companies are even starting to use and build "xApps" that sit on the NetWeaver stack and "extend" their enterprise. Web services and "open standards" are the key to delivering on that extended enterprise. The skills needed will be derived from this overall vision, so if the big picture is clear, it will be easier to anticipate where the skills needs will be.

Hopping from industry from industry will be risky business. Up until this point, consultants with solid implementation skills could jump from industry to industry in search of the best project at the best rate. However, both SAP and its customers are emphasizing the importance of consultants who know a particular industry.

I had one SAP product manager tell me that consultants without an industry focus would have a hard time in tomorrow’s SAP market. mySAP ERP 2005 ships with 25 different industry solutions (meaning that industry solutions no longer have separate and sometimes confusing release schedules).

Consultants who know how to apply an industry’s "best practices" are going to be in demand. This also points back to an emphasis on overall business know-how as opposed to configuration skills. So if customers are asking for more industry experience right now, why do I list this as a future skill? Because as much as customers want this type of industry background, the SAP consulting market is hot enough that I’m not sure that SAP hiring managers will always be able to hold out for an industry-focused consultants.

Many of the best SAP consultants have worked in multiple industries. At some point you have to let go of your ultimate wish list and staff your project. But in the future, consultants with a consistent industry focus are going to have a big edge. At some point, it may eventually become a non-negotiable requirement.