HR people say, a good job(employer) is the one, you can recommend to a close friend, family member or somebody important in your life. Of course the message is a little shortened and I can imagine a Facebook group is being created to fight against my short-cut, but believe me, it works this way.
Today I am here to tell you about my job and recommend you to consider getting a similar one. Well, not the exact one like mine, but a job in the world of SAP.
Why would you do that? Let me tell you why I write this blog first (this blog) and I am going to tell you what benefits you can get from your possible SAP career, my dear young brain in the soon-to-come second part of the blog).
You can find an interesting comment by Martin Gillet, SAP Mentor (honored status even if you don´t know the man) from Belgium, below my last blog "Is SAP career good for top IT students??". Read the blog and the comment yourself or let me remind the comment (shortened):
"I trust SAP is a great place where you can get international exposure to high tech and innovation, building up the business tools of tomorrow. Although many alternatives exist, we must, as a Community, as SAP Mentors share these information and values, to promote a great place to work and build a career. For your information, I just received today my monthly copy of the RH Tribune (well known Human Resources magazine for French speakers) which has an article on 'How to seduce 2010 graduates'... In the field of study 'IT', SAP only shows up at the 13th place!"
The comment keeps bugging me days and nights since it appeared below my blog. It is a duty of everybody, who can help, to help, so I feel like I´d better try to help here. I started reading all the information sources I could find (what means more and more blogs on SDN, for example, you can do the same here: SAP Blogs: Career Center). I have found some more people interested in the "future of SAP", "attracting young IT brains" and similar topics.
Especially "Where is the next generation of SAPpies coming from??" by Yariv Zur (SAP Labs Israel) or "SAP's Role in Growing The Next Generation of Technology Leaders" by Jason Grosse (SAP Canada) which deal with the "ready-to-get-hired-aged-people" or a beautiful blog by Maya Bahar about GirlTech@SAP (what is an awesome initiative and I would love to see some more like this one, I send my regards to Maya...!).
We (the team, if I am on the team; the team, which does not exist...yet) should tell the young talented IT and business people (and some more fields, I can´t address) how is it to work for SAP, with SAP, in SAP because it is great! and we would like to see the name of The Company moving up in the Survey list in the coming years.
Yes, it may be fun to work for Google. I understand that (not really, because I have never had a desire to program a zillion one web page with a Google logo). But these people are not responsible for money, goods, business, lives, careers, markets and all the stuff you get responsible for when you work with SAP. Let me adapt a comment posted by Martin Lang Is SAP career good for top IT students?: "I would guess potentially even more (growth opportunities) so than with many other tech careers, as pretty much everything SAP is ultimately part of companies core processes and core processes usually are revenue generating. Improving revenue generating processes is something employers or companies are always extremely excited about, which usually reflects in good compensation as well as good working environments."
When you read these words, you can think about the career opportunities, about the money, the positions and other material things you could get through the SAP career. But I remind this comment, because you can apply the words on the "personal purpose" and the responsibility issue. You can program some more Google apps to have some "fun" (sometimes I feel like those people who dream about working for Google don´t understand that would have to work except all that "fun"). But for me, and for my friends, it is a rewarding feeling to participate on the company´s success, because these days the whole business is done in your ERP system. In the other words: you can program computer games with witches and sorcerers or you can hunt the invoices and debts. Which one is more adult?
A friend of mine, who is starting his SAP career right now, comments: I will be able to contribute to a company and will enjoy the satisfaction once I solve a problem, that will in turn make the business more efficient and that is very important to me.
By the way: when you kill a digital sorcerer, nothing changes. But when you help the company earn some money, you could help people to change their lives: read about Food for points and how Members Inspire New SAP Community Network Recognition Program.
There are more cool things about working with SAP. The one most important for me is that SAP supports many processes, offers so many out-of-the box features and functionality, which is of a high standard. That means you can learn a lot (about doing business, running company etc.) only from following processes in SAP, learning how they work/ flow.
Let´s say, you´re a fresh graduate and start some Java dev job. What will the project, the team teaches you about the "functional side", about who will use your software, why, how much money will it spare, how users want to use the software? They will not teach you much (in my opinion): they will give you some papers, mock-ups, descriptions about what to develop, about the algorithms, security etc., but that is all technical so much. It will not teach you anything about Purchasing, Banking, Planning or Staffing, just to name few topics.
Doing SAP one learns a lot about how the company works. They told me nothing about the invoicing at school, and I have never been on Java dev project where I understood anything more about the topic except the Java syntax and libraries. SAP will help you grow.
P.S.: I think Google is a great company, but this blog is not about "Hey, come work to Google, man", so please forgive me the comparison.
Regards,
Otto
