SAP Skills Shortage Costs SAP's Customers, Partners and, Ultimately, SAP AG
ERP, NetWeaver and BI skills development are a priority for SAP as the spread of its software outpaces the supply of people to implement it. SAP now reaches out to prospective IT workers and offers online courses in multiple languages to attract new talent to the SAP ecosystem.
In addition, SAP is expanding its strategic relationships with its top 20 implementation partners (which, actually, do approximately 70 percent of SAP product implementations) "to eliminate or reduce some of the impediments to growth," Westhuizen says. (To read about Oracle's new SMB partner plans, see "Inside Oracle's Plans to Conquer the SMB Applications Market.")
Lastly, Westhuizen says SAP now offers expanded and tiered education and certification programs to not only include online learning formats and more flexible pricing options but also courses that are taught in more languages—not solely English and German but Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, French and Mandarin as well. "We revamped the entire certification program," he says. "We see certification as an underlying benchmark of quality."
Westhuizen says that SAP will be tracking data points from all of those areas very carefully during the coming years. "We're trying to be as proactive as possible," he says, "as opposed to what we used to be, which was reactive."
What's at stake is quite apparent to SAP execs, Westhuizen adds. "Without a doubt," he says, "if it's [an area] that we don't continue to address, it is a factor that can impact our longer-term success."
