SAP Talent Scarce, Opportunities Rich

A high ranking SAP exec recently confirmed a potential deficit of 30,000 - 40,000 SAP consultants over the next few years. For its part, SAP is working to fill the gap by increasing its investment in the SAP University Alliances program, a network of nearly 900 colleges and universities in 30 countries that provides SAP training to 150,000 students worldwide. While admirable, many experts feel the SAP Alliance program will do little to ease today's SAP's talent crunch.

Read InformationWeek article: How Bad is the SAP Talent Shortage?  

Read SAP press release: SAP Helps Companies Win Today’s Race for Tomorrow’s Talent

ERP, NetWeaver and BI skills development are a priority for SAP as the spread of its software outpaces the supply of people to implement it. SAP now reaches out to prospective IT workers and offers online courses in multiple languages to attract new talent to the SAP ecosystem.

Read CIO article: SAP skills shortage impacts SAP customers, partners and, ultimately, SAP

SAP's growth plans hinge heavily on its partner ecosystem. And we're not just talking about the big boys. SAP's 3,000 tier-two consulting partners are deepening their SAP talent pools. To ensure a "baseline of quality" in SAP skills on the market, SAP is aggressively extending a broad array of educational and training support program throughout its partner ecosystem. The appetite for SAP training and continual education is voracious among SAP partners. According to industry sources, in the first quarter of 2008, there was a 38% jump in the number of people taking SAP certification programs.

Read InformationWeek article: How SAP is Trying to Fill the Talent Pipeline

According to Gartner Research , a new shortage of skills and talent in IT and business is threatening business growth. More specifically, Gartner maintains that the current demand requires IT pros with strong business process expertise as well as technology proficiency -- an increasingly rare sort of  hands-on experience that cannot be rushed or faked.

Read Computing SA article: Looming IT Shortage

On this front, SAP is pumping new incentives, tools and resources into it rapidly growing BPX Community , a collaborative online environment where currently 350,000 members share business process solutions, organizational expertise and best-practices to increase business agility.

Read SAP press release: SAP Fosters Collaboration and Education Among its Growing Business Process Expert Community

The upshot of all this for SAP consultants with demonstrable business experience? Can you say, "Ka-ching!" According to some sources, salaries for certain SAP skills have spiked as much as $40,000 in the past few years because the release of new applications outpaced the skills needed to manage them. Hot skill sets, such as SAP BI and Basis, in-house IT job applicants with the latest NetWeaver skills are now demanding between $120,000 and $140,000 a year. Consultants with hot SAP skills are billing between $135 and $200 an hour.

According to recent research conducted by Foote Partners LLC, an IT skills staffing consultancy, the SAP skills shortage is worse than that of any other vendor. Increased pay is the best indicator of increased demand, and pay has increased by more than 10% over the past year for eight SAP skills, among them SAP MDM, SAP ERP, NetWeaver BI, and SAP HCM.

Read SearchSAP.com article: SAP Seeks to Overcome Skills Shortage  

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