Comments on: SAP’s new certification strategy

By: Raj

Raj — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 02:52:30 +0000

I have myself been a ‘fresher’ to SAP market. I was aggressively told by multiple private SAP traning providers about the “benefits” of SAP certification. I am witness to blatant use of SAP certification as a bite to catch more people for training revenue of these institutes. One I passed successfully, i witnessed the harship to get into SAP market (i was personally aware of this possibility). SAP can do something to help freshers not to get carried away by such claims.

By: SAP certification

SAP certification — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:09:24 +0000

Accoding to myself, Certification important but , there should be levels like junior level for freshers, Middle level for 2 to 5 years experience and Master level for who most experienced , research People

By: Rob Donelson

Rob Donelson — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:48:13 +0000

Thanks for writing on this topic, I find it very interesting that there are planned to be “levels” of certification, this might actually differentiate individuals when resumes are being evaluated.

While I strongly agree that the real measure of SAP skills comes only with experience, and is only verifiable through good references and/or technical interviews, I believe that having certifications is important. Here’s why:

It’s incredibly difficult for an employer/customer looking for a specific skill to evaluate the capabilities of a person (unless the employer already has a person with the skills to evaluate the prospective employee, in which case they can positively verify the skills and this discussion is really moot). Having both experience and a certification on a resume can help weed through the folks that show experience but have only worked, say, as a business user or tester and have no design and configuration experience, and the “freshers” that have a certification with no experience.

By: David Foote

David Foote — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:29:04 +0000

The value of certification is most definitely in the eye of the beholder, or the employer in this case. SAP has some hard decision to make here. If there certs are too easy to get, they will have less value. These days an intermediate cert must have a lab requirement or other hands-on element so that expertise is not only understood but applied as a condition of being certified. Easy lab = less value. Rigorous lab = more value. A master-level IT cert in 2008 should have a peer review component: if you don’t pass muster, go back and work on your chops until the ‘masters’ say you’ve got their touch (example: master leverl IT Architect certs from both Microsoft and The Open Group). Many of us will be watching SAP to see exactly which road they choose to follow. Ultimately SAP (and SAP professionals) will get out of it exactly what they put into it.

By: martin english

martin english — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:11:30 +0000

A couple of years ago I was interviewing for spots on a team that was to install pretty much the entire SAP catalogue in a 4 tier landscape (dev, qa, regression, and prod).

I was dismayed by the number of ‘SAP Certified’ BASIS people (or Netweaver Technical Consultants) who knew nothing about the operating system, who couldn’t appreciate basic change management (i.e. test it before you go live !!), and so on.

Apart from OS/DB migration, where SAP will not support the result if there is no certified migration consultant on the project, Certification are mostly a way of marketing yourself (or your company). They provide a minor use in verifying (to myself) that I know something about BASIS work, but they are no substitute for OS and DBMS and business knowledge.

If you hire someone purely on the basis (sorry) of their certification, then you deseve what you get.

By: Jon Reed

Jon Reed — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 22:42:58 +0000

Demir, great entry.

I agree with a number of the points you have made here, especially your point that “freshers” are the ones who are most likely to overestimate the impact of certification and lose valuable money and time by misperceiving how to apply SAP certification.

I also strongly agree that the only place to obtain SAP certification is from sAP itself. The exception would be for an SAP project team, where they might want to test the market in terms of whatever customized training they might need, but for the individual, it’s SAP certification that carries the credibility.

One thing that needs some more exploration is the higher two levels of SAP certification – in terms of what is currently available. I do believe there are some of the second professional-level certifications now available in some areas, but I’m not quite clear. And I don’t believe any of the master-level certifications are yet available. Also, at last year’s TechEd, I was told by an SAP rep that only the highest level, master-level, would require SAP field/project experience, but in your writeup, and in the material you quoted, it implies that the second level, professional-level, also involves, potentially, some verified field experience.

Hopefully we can get to the bottom of some of these new developments in SAP certification, and encourage a dialogue the helps folks to make the right certification choices in the context of a well-thought SAP career strategy. Thanks for furthering this conversation Demir.

- Jon Reed -