Seeking bread and butter Basis positions
My background:
I have been working as a Basis admin for 10+ years and I have experience in R/3 as well as multiple OS's & DB's. I am now on the market, but am finding it difficult, as many employers are looking for people with BW, AP0, CRM or other aspects of SAP, which I currently do not have any experience in. How can I get companies excited about my current expertise and look past the fact that to this point, I have not had the opportunity to work with other aspects of SAP?

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There are still some bread and butter Basis positions out there, though they are hard to come by. You are someone that might benefit from a bit of training in a new area of SAP related to Basis, such as BW. It might make your resume more attractive, especially since your other SAP hands-on skills are so deep. There's no real secret to building your Basis skills, you basically need to sacrifice rate, location, whatever, in order to choose a project that is going to upgrade to a new version of SAP (ideally 4.7 or NetWeaver/mySAP ERP). If you can land an upgrade project, the bells and whistles will take care of themselves. The next two project choices you make will be the defining choices in this phase of your SAP career. If you choose skills over rates, and get a bit of good luck with a company that does follow through with its plans, you should be able to "ride the NetWeaver wave" for a few more years. But, you are at a crossroads now, and are vulnerable to being excluded from these positions down the road, so do "whatever it takes" now to land such experience.

This was first published in October 2004