5 comments

• 

  Daryl James

  7 months ago

  We have a wealth of SAP Trend data and freelance opportunities over at oDesk that might supplement the suggested resources in this article. Just check out www.odesk.com/trends/sap.
  - Daryl
  oDesk
  reply
• 

  Affordable SEO Services

  7 months ago

  How did you get your start doing sap abap developer work, and what career moves did you make to get to your current position?
  
  Do you need a particular educational background?
  reply
• 

  martin_english

  7 months ago

  Actually, I'm not an ABAP developer. I'm a BASIS (old skool name) / Netweaver Technical (new name) Consultant. While I've been in IT for over 30 years, I've only been doing serious R3 / Netweaver BASIS work for about 8 years or so. While the other 22 years have little or no direct bearing on my R3 work, the experience - in mainframe systems programming, performance management and database administration - was a very good fit for the role of BASIS administrator of the old R2 systems (very basically, it was a 'green screen' mainframe version of SAP, that was proted to UNIX client server architechture as the original R3 2.x release).
  
  As this was phased out, I moved over to implementing and supporting R3 and Netweaver systems. In also made sure that employers knew I was interested in R3, by keeping up with industry news and demonstrating that I knew what was out there in SAP products and services.
  
  I still try to keep up to speed with all things BASIS, in as many releases as possible; for example I probably spend 10 - 15 hours a week supporting systems that are out of support for one or more of the operating system, DBMS, or SAP release. However, i also keep my hand in by installing and running the SAP provided trial installations..
  reply
• 

  Damian Cox

  7 months ago

  Hi Martin,
  
  I couldn't agree more. My background is similar to your but I went the Analyst programmer path and there has been more than one occasion where I have been grateful for learning my trade under sysprogs who cherished every operation and every slice of memory.
  
  Things aren't so different these days in SAP land and the premise that being a competent programmer is far more valuable than being able to code still holds true. Language is essentially irrelevant in the end ... that's what manuals are for,
  
  These days I run data conversion teams and I will always take programmers and techno-functional guys that understand business processes over those that simply "know ABAP" or "know LSMW".
  
  I liked reading your comment.
  
  Damian Cox
  reply
• 

  Daryl James

  7 months ago

  Great post. You're right, most look for specific advice with too many variables left unanswered. I like your approach. Thanks for the resources too.
  reply