Some Ideas And Tips On SAP Courses From Ameerpet, Hyderabad

The SAP scene has recently exploded and now everybody wants to be an SAP Consultant. Such is the demand that there's an SAP Street in Ameerpet full of SAP coaching classes offering the hottest modules for as low as 12k for a year—Yes, 12k and you can attend lectures repeatedly and use the labs for an entire year (this is how it was at my institute but I'm sure most will follow the same policy). The official SAP certification which is definitely overpriced at around 3-4lacs and out of reach for most who have already spent a lot on a B.Tech / BE degree is another important factor for the SAP street boom in Ameerpet.

If you are thinking about going for an SAP course in Ameerpet consider these points

Disclaimer: I'm writing these out of my experience and view point you might want to do some more research and thinking before making an decision.

Terminology: 

"Hardcore fresher" means a graduate, one with no work ex at all. 
By "trained" I mean a hardcore fresher who has just done the SAP course without the official
SAP certification.
By "certified" I mean a hardcore fresher who has done the official SAP certification but has no work-ex at all.
By "SAP fresher candidates" I mean both of the above.
These terms are valid for all modules.

Hardcore freshers don't go for it

Here's why:

1. Interview calls

It's really difficult to get any interview calls in the first place forget about getting a job! Now this may not always happen and I have a friend who got an SAP ABAP job in a month after finishing the course from one such institution in Ameerpet. But that was around 2009-2010, the situation now looks grim - in my case the course dragged too long and you waste a lot of time and secondly — limited openings. 

I've been applying for jobs since Jan, 2014 and now it's April, 2014 and I have given only 2 ABAP Fresher interviews yet. A search on naukri and other jobs portals brings up many "SAP ABAP Fresher openings" in 0-1 year experience range but hardly any of those convert to an interview opportunity. On top of that SAP AG has created a massive shortage in the SAP fresher market thanks to its policy on the certification which we will come to later in this post. 

Most companies are looking to hire consultants with at least one end-to-end implementation, one HR told me some experience even 6 months will be do if I want to appear for the interview but only trained (didn't inquire about certified) candidates are just not preferred it seems as of now and this was one of those 0-1 experience openings on naukri. MNCs hire certified professionals and may give an interview chance to the trained candidates but there are people struggling even after getting certified.

After all this very few companies are left who will call SAP fresher candidates for interviews and that makes the competition unbelievably insane. The certified ones may have an edge over the trained ones but it's not much.

2. Resume gap 

This relates to the previous post about the course duration in of software courses in Ameerpet but it goes to a whole new level in SAP courses. As a hardcore fresher it takes time to learn anything new and so it's true in SAP case as well but it takes a little more time compared to Java, C++, .Net and other stuff you must have done in your undergrad courses. I won't repeat myself, I covered this in the last post so please check it out. In short, the problem is you'll be spending a lot of time studying and mastering SAP and like I mentioned above openings for SAP freshers are few and far between, this all adds up to your resume gap which doesn't really shine there. 

For those with some work-ex

Say you have worked on Java, .Net or SQL or some other technology and you then hear from your friends that SAP consultants sleep over beds of cash then what do you do? Think about getting in, right? After all we all know your bed is old now and it's a time for change. I want to cover in this in 2 parts: 

1. Technical to SAP
2. Non-technical to SAP

Technical to SAP:

Most who will try to make this jump so that they can get themselves the figurative bed of cash will be from developer backgrounds. These mostly will and should go for the ABAP module which is SAP's programming language. 

A small warning here is that while it's true that knowing to work on one programming language makes the next easy, this falls a little short when it comes to ABAP. Yes overall it'll make the experience of learning seem easy but then ABAP is totally different from mainstream development languages like Java and C++. 

The object oriented concepts are the same and that will be of some help but taking the whole picture into consideration it's not much. 

I can only make a guess that for someone with database background ABAP might be easier since it deals with database too but there's lot more which I should be covering in another entire post.

And before taking this route to SAP land I think one must get into an SAP consulting firm and then think about courses and at times the courses are not required as your seniors will be around and train you on the job if you are being moved to an SAP project, it should be easier from there.

This post is becoming too big. Guess, I'll just stop here and post this and write a part 2 or come back to this and edit it. So do come back.