SAP By The Numbers

Here there is an interested article about SAP jobs in US. The article is from SAP Cookbook newsletter.

As you would expect,
we're up across the board from our Dec 29th demand numbers. There are more opportunities right now for SAP professionals than there ever has been. There are two reasons for this phenomenon: 1) more business are running SAP than ever, and 2) the seasonal phenomenon of business spending on Information Technology. That is, things will always slow down starting in November which projects and finance departments go into fiscal freeze periods where no changes are made to accounting systems. No changes to accounting systems means no IT spending. And certainly very few projects are being kicked off during this time, except for the most critical, most tenuous, and most urgent.

In general I expect to see demand numbers fall starting in November, picking back up somewhere around the 1st or 2nd weeks of January. And this year we barely saw a pause in hiring - things have been good. And so here we are toward the end of January, and demand for every major consulting area is back up.
Every consulting area is showing growth - admittedly, some areas are tronger than other - but no area has fallen off of a cliff.

I want call out a couple of areas that are showing an unusually high uptick in demand: SAP CRM and SAP Project Managers. I know CRM is a solid offering from SAP, but what can explain this surge in demand for CRM resources? I don't have an anwser - perhaps someone can help me with this? SAP Project Management is perhaps easier to explain. I don't think that SAP project managers are growing on trees (like many people might claim is the case for SAP Basis, ABAP, and Portals or many other technical areas). And project managers have a skillset that can't easily be "offshored" or fulfilled remotely.

I have always thought that project managers have the toughest job in the world, and my hat is off to anyone out there that steps up to take the reigns of a project - it's the hardest work in the business, heck some of the hardest work period. The more people understand about IT, the understand that this is Software Engineering - and Software Engineering is risky, takes time, and just about 80% of Software Engineering projects fail. In any case, SAP project managers are not growing on trees and this is such a good area of opportunity that I think there is a very real opportuinty for senior SAP functional consultants to step up and take a swing at project management. And project managers set budgets, don't they? They may be in a position to pay themselves the highest rates on a project.

Now I know many senior project managers who would warn you against pursuing a career in project management, but the reality is that moving up the food chain in the world of Information Technology means managing projects - righly or wrongly, and if you want to make it to the most senior levels of management, the project management two-step is one you must master.

Functional Area	June 21 Demand	Oct 19 Demand	Dec 1 Demand	Dec 29 Demand		Jan 21 Demand
SAP Portals	578	736	705	698		795
SAP CRM	684	737	760	809		1218
SAP Basis	1858	1374	1572	1403		1659
SAP HR	1094	816	882	829		1125
SAP ABAP	882	951	1100	1084		1094
SAP BW	996	1035	1182	1029		1188
SAP FI	972	601	1077	1042		1148
SAP SD	853	929	1016	957		1099
SAP MM	892	899	1115	1011		1237
SAP Security	913	905	963	814		927
SAP SRM	293	286	367	334		390
Project Mgr	1454	1331	1467	1348		1613