Breaking into SAP with an IT background
I have been in the IT industry for almost 15 years now. I have been a Microsoft Windows administrator, a technical consultant covering presales and post sales support and am currently a project manager.

I am more interested in becoming an SAP consultant. What would be your advice for me to take up SAP training and also what are the chances of me breaking into a real world SAP consultant job?

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Generally speaking, if you have a strong technical background, if you add some type of "enterprise level" experience on top of it, ideally with a major ERP package like Oracle or SAP, you should see your market value (and billable rate) go up. So, I like your strategy. But here's the catch: once you decide upon your target market, in this case SAP, you have to do a lot of homework. Even though SAP is hot, I would caution against the assumption that all you have to do to break into SAP is to get training and then get snapped up by a consulting firm. I have written about breaking into SAP many times in this column, and my answer is usually the same: generally speaking, you need to develop a track record as an employee of a firm implementing SAP before you can get your opportunity as a consultant.

Your next job is to figure out how to take advantage of your current skills within an SAP environment. This way, even as a junior-level SAP person, you'll have senior skills in other areas that are relevant to your role. I don't know a lot about your background, but it seems to me that one way into SAP for you might be in a Microsoft-heavy environment where you already have significant skills. Since many midsize companies are implementing SAP, and since many of those in the SMB space are "Microsoft shops," you might want to focus on looking at smaller SAP installs, or perhaps even working for a consulting firm that serves that type of company. Training from SAP can certainly help you, but be careful to manage your expectations about the opportunities it might bring you on the other side. Yes, SAP is hot, but it's a lot of work, and you have to be deeply committed to pursuing excellence in SAP to succeed as an SAP consultant in the long term.

This was first published in February 2008