Tough Times for SAP Professionals

“I got the best looking resume I’ve ever seen.”

-- Raymond Mannion, SAP Consultant

Last month’s departure of SAP CEO Leo Apotheker underscores the challenges everyone faces who makes a livelihood doing anything connected with SAP. Today more software profit comes from tweaking a web interface than from making hardcore engineering innovations like those that drove profits at SAP for decades. “Big Software” is today what “Big Iron” was in the PC era. One solution (SAP’s in 2009) is to raise service prices for customers looking to cut costs. Hence, Leo’s departure.

More evidence of the shrinking value of IT engineering innovation is the size of the checks that venture capital firms and angel investors write. It simply costs less to start companies like Twitter that require less new engineering content. That’s why the return on venture capital has been zero for a decade. In the wake of the 1990s’ capital overhang a flood of money chased deals that simply don’t need so much cash.

This shift has profound consequences for the tens of thousands of SAP professionals around the world. They’ve invested years learning SAP. That knowledge will never again have the value it did during the glory days.

These trends are no secret. The press has covered them for years. If you’re an SAP professional you certainly already get this. So here’s what I don’t get: why don’t SAP professionals market themselves better? If your pond is shrinking, then you have only two options: either find a new pond, or learn how to stay on top.

Looking at the SAP resumes posted online you would think most of these men and women have just given up. The resumes are a mess — bad English, poorly organized, full of punctuation mistakes — pretty much everything you can do to make yourself unattractive. Most SAP professionals don’t even include a photo, and those that do seem to have no sense of lighting, composition or the existence of Photoshop.

Nor do they seem to understand the concept of a database. One thing that sets SAP careers apart is that education and experience are highly structured. Careers can be summarized (and therefore tagged) by industries, modules, toolsets, languages, countries and so on. You should be able to find candidates just by typing something like: “8 years auto + 5 years MM + 2 years SD + Chinese language + US national.” (MM and SD are SAP modules.)

Yet hardly any SAP resumes are structured that way. Online resume databases either employ unstructured text searches or make the candidate fill out separate forms for each database, plus submit a resume. Why can’t the resume itself be the form? That way the resume could be portable across databases — and people (not just software) would always know where to look for relevant search criteria.

To see how such a resume can look, check this one out. (And read the candidate’s own thoughts on his resume experience.)

Rather than engineering innovation, more ROI today comes from innovating how engineering value is presented to the market. Apparently, that’s something SAP professionals need to learn from the top down.