Demand for SAP skills rising

[Doug Heywood]

Demand for SAP skills keeps rising

Enterprise app skills demand up sharply, pushing skills pay more than 19% higher despite budget conservatism.

Chris Kanaracus (IDG News Service) 12/09/2008 08:00:00

The ongoing demand for workers skilled in SAP technologies grew dramatically stronger in recent months, according to Foote Partners, an analyst firm that tracks pay rates for IT jobs.

"Employers are feeling more pain than ever in their search for skilled and experienced SAP talent. We expect this to continue for the next year and a half, and maybe longer, " CEO David Foote said in a detailed report on the firm's findings.

The report is based on pay premiums earned by 22,000 IT professionals in the US and Canada.

During the six months ended July 1, non-certified SAP skills showed the largest increases in pay, rising between 25 percent and 30 percent in some cases, according to Foote's data.

Pay is particularly going up for skills centered on SAP's NetWeaver platform, but the hiring environment is "not peaches and cream for those hanging on to their SAP ERP 4.6 or ERP 6.0 systems either," Foote said in the report.

However, SAP skills are far from the only ones in high demand.

Other areas showing strong upticks in pay during the first half of this year include Oracle, wireless networking, PHP development, business intelligence and network security, according to Foote.

Meanwhile, compensation for other skills dropped, the firm said. Pay for Lotus Notes/Domino and Exchange skills both fell 14.3 percent, for example.

As for SAP, company spokesman Saswato Das said via e-mail that a distinction should be made between SAP employees and the SAP consultants who work with the vendor's partners.

"As a result of the strong demand and market uptake for SAP solutions, there is a corresponding increased demand for IT consultants with SAP skills. We are actively working with our partners to build the pipeline to meet this demand," he wrote.

SAP and partners have certified 20,000 SAP professionals in the past 18 months, and the company is well on its way to reaching a goal of certifying 30,000 of them in 2008, according to Das.

Also, SAP itself has had little problem attracting enough qualified talent, he added.

[Steve Bennett]

Aussie IT jobs market still buoyant

Brett Winterford, ZDNet.com.au
22 October 2008 02:27 PM

There is still plenty of local work for skilled IT staff despite a global financial crisis, according to one of Australia's largest technology staff recruiters, but not much room to move in terms of higher salaries.

The IT jobs market was still as buoyant today as it was six months ago, according Peter Noblet, regional director of Hays Information Technology recruitment.

"While there is no denying employers are monitoring the international financial crisis closely, and there certainly have been consequences locally, it is not accurate to assume it has impacted recruitment activity in every sector," he said today.

"We see no evidence that the [information technology] market as a whole will stop hiring any time soon. In fact, strong demand still exists from those companies looking to up-skill their current staff".

After several years of modest salary growth, the recruiter's latest quarterly report says salaries have "stabilised over the past six months and are unlikely to increase in the immediate future".

The recruiter said that many candidates now valued job security as highly as they would salary. "People seeking permanent employment are looking at other areas like the company's position in the market, the impact they would have in their job, rather than just the rates of pay," said Noblet.

The growth areas, according to Hays, included the booming Queensland capital of Brisbane, the resource-rich Perth as well as work within the government sector in Victoria.
Skills-wise, the most in-demand roles were in software development, network engineering, technical writers, business analysts and trainers. On the nose are middle management and project managers, both in over-supply.

Candidates with experience around Microsoft (particularly .NET, SQL Server and SharePoint), SAP and Cisco IP telephony are best-placed for work. Candidates with experience in "green" cost-saving technologies such as virtualisation also continue to be in high demand.

[admin]

A computerworld survey has found increased demand for BI skills. Read about it here.

[JohnG]

Checkout this post on the CORTEX blog here.

I am SAP beginner and that tips had really helped me in getting why the SAP is successful.