I have been reading “The SAP Consultant Handbook” by Jon Reed and Michael Doane on my flight home from San Diego. It is a nice short book about how it is to be a part of the SAP eco system.
It is always nice to be reconfirmed in some of the ideas you have, of what you see the business you are in. The book is old from 1999 and updated in 2004. A lot of things have happened in the SAP field over the last years.
The book goes into details with all the different aspect of how you can approach the SAP marked either as a consultant or as an end user. The premise for those has not changed over the years. So it is the same type of decisions you will have to make today. In that perspective I think it is a killer book for everybody how wants to move into the SAP field.
There is a nice way of balancing what to do in some situations, should you take a higher paying job to work with older systems or getting the job that makes you travel.
One issue I have been seeing is that people may not have the long term for what they want to do in the business. They just have a job and like or don’t like it. The long term vision is important when you are selecting the job and when you have to select if you want to move.
One interesting thing the is
The Catch-22 of SAP: there are not enough trained consultants because those who have training are consulting and none of them are teaching.
It makes it really hard for new people to enter the space and make sure that companies are getting more qualified jobs.
One of the reasons is that it is either a job as a trainer or as an implementer. This means that you do not get the information for people how really do the implementation. It would be nice if it was possible for some of the top implementers/specialists to be able to deliver content they know.