ASUG Tech Con­nect entered its third and final day Thurs­day, Nov. 9, with tech­nol­o­gy and com­mu­ni­ty top of mind for the devel­op­ers, prac­ti­tion­ers, enter­prise archi­tects, and glob­al IT lead­ers who con­vened in New Orleans along­side SAP experts and indus­try lead­ers to share knowl­edge and build valu­able SAP skills. 

Fol­low­ing an exu­ber­ant open­ing per­for­mance by the Kin­folk brass band, ASUG CEO Geoff Scott and Kel­ly Dowl­ing, Direc­tor of Con­tent Strat­e­gy at ASUG, took the stage to salute atten­dees and reflect on the first-of-its-kind con­fer­ence. ​“If you were not at ASUG Tech Con­nect this year, you missed out on three tremen­dous days of learn­ing,” said Scott, announc­ing that the con­fer­ence will return in 2024. 

Scott was then joined on stage by Matt Schwartz, Glob­al Head of AWS SAP Alliance and Part­ner Net­work at Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, and Max Wes­sel, Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent & Chief Learn­ing Offi­cer of SAP Learn­ing, to dis­cuss how orga­ni­za­tions can devel­op, cap­ture, and retain the skills and com­pe­ten­cies need­ed to thrive dur­ing busi­ness transformation.

In their keynote dis­cus­sion, record­ed live as a spe­cial-edi­tion episode of the ASUG Talks pod­cast, all three lead­ers reflect­ed on the widen­ing tech­nol­o­gy skills gap and cor­re­spond­ing­ly increas­ing need to impart SAP skills to younger generations.

Future-Proof­ing Skill Sets

Schwartz advo­cat­ed for more col­lege recruit­ing, stress­ing the impor­tance of indi­vid­u­als engag­ing oth­ers across their orga­ni­za­tions to over­see and facil­i­tate such ini­tia­tives. ​“SAP is an incred­i­ble career, and it’s a great place to start your career; there’s a tremen­dous amount of oppor­tu­ni­ty for peo­ple in this space,” he said.

Peo­ple in job func­tions such as finance and sup­ply chain, mean­while, pos­sess domain knowl­edge that’s high­ly applic­a­ble in tran­si­tion­ing to learn­ing and devel­op­ing SAP skills, he said. ​“We need to make sure we’re upskilling our sea­soned pro­fes­sion­als to learn new tech­nolo­gies, because the domain exper­tise they have today is incred­i­bly valu­able,” Schwartz added. ​“They’re the ones who know how things have been done, and they’re the ones who are going to make sure things can tran­si­tion correctly.”

With SAP com­mit­ted to upskilling 2 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als by 2025 through an inte­grat­ed series of cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­grams, cours­es, and enhance­ments to the SAP Learn­ing Hub, Wes­sel reflect­ed on the evo­lu­tion of the SAP Learn­ing site, which launched in 2021 with sev­en learn­ing jour­neys for devel­op­ers and now offers more than 140 jour­neys for dif­fer­ent roles and skill levels. 

Shift­ing from prod­uct-based cer­ti­fi­ca­tions to role-based offer­ings to bet­ter equip learn­ers to nav­i­gate the dynam­ic and ever-evolv­ing job mar­ket, SAP Learn­ing recent­ly intro­duced role-based cer­ti­fi­ca­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties for back­end devel­op­ers with ABAP Cloud and is soon to launch anoth­er cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for back­end devel­op­ers using the SAP Cloud Appli­ca­tion Pro­gram­ming (CAP) mod­el, both built in col­lab­o­ra­tion with ASUG.

“We need to give every sin­gle SAP pro­fes­sion­al out there the oppor­tu­ni­ty to future-proof their own skill set for the next decades,” Wes­sel said. Pre­vi­ous­ly, SAP Learn­ing intro­duced role-based cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for enter­prise archi­tects; Wes­sel also not­ed the recent arrival of a new developer’s guide for SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (SAP BTP), to sup­ple­ment the SAP BTP Guid­ance Frame­work.

Schwartz dis­cussed open­SAP cours­es from SAP and AWS, focused on accel­er­at­ing the adop­tion of SAP S/4HANA and SAP BTP on AWS and devel­op­ing joint ref­er­ence archi­tec­tures for inno­va­tion on SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form with AWS capa­bil­i­ties; one cur­rent open­SAP course focus­es on build­ing resilient appli­ca­tions on SAP BTP with AWS. ​“Peo­ple want to exper­i­ment, to under­stand when and where to use BTP,” Schwartz said, not­ing that AWS has a goal of edu­cat­ing 29 mil­lion peo­ple with basic cloud expe­ri­ence by 2025.

“Don’t be afraid to fail,” Schwartz advised those in the audi­ence. ​“Pick small projects, try them out. If you fail, try again. But give your teams a chance to learn — and learn from suc­cess, but also learn from fail­ure. But don’t wait. Don’t be afraid to try to start lever­ag­ing BTP right now.”

Added Schwartz: ​“It’s hard to get projects approved, but it’s a lot eas­i­er if you go to your lead­er­ship and say, ​‘Look, we want to exper­i­ment, we want to pick a very pre­scrip­tive pain point, we’re going to lever­age BTP on AWS, and we’re going to go solve it.’ ”

“How Do We Impart Wisdom?” 

Dis­cussing the vast poten­tial — and poten­tial pit­falls — of gen­er­a­tive AI for busi­ness, both Wes­sel and Schwartz expressed the need to tread care­ful­ly while mov­ing for­ward, to ensure that AI is effec­tive­ly aug­ment­ing human inge­nu­ity and accel­er­at­ing edu­ca­tion, rather than in any way reduc­ing the need for hands-on learning. 

“There’s a dan­ger, if we super-charge peo­ple’s capa­bil­i­ty, that we take away some of the inter­ac­tion that made them expert in the first place,” Wes­sel added. ​“For every­body in this room, what we have to think about is, ​‘How do we impart wis­dom, the right way of ask­ing ques­tions, and the right con­text, to a gen­er­a­tion of folks who are going to enter the work­force with tools that we only wish we’d had?’” 

Wes­sel, Schwartz, and Scott all affirmed that tech­no­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion is inevitable, and that upskilling one’s capa­bil­i­ties with emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies is an excep­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty to advance a career or piv­ot between pro­fes­sion­al pathways. 

“Learn to be curi­ous,” Schwartz advised atten­dees, not­ing that he’s nev­er reject­ed train­ing requests from any­one on his team who’s pre­sent­ed a basic busi­ness case for what they want to learn. 

“And learn about the cloud, even if it’s not your pri­ma­ry role, because it’s going to help you under­stand every­one,” he said. ​“Play with all these tools, as much as pos­si­ble. Learn them, because your cus­tomers are going to ask you ques­tions about these technologies.”

Schwartz sees gen­er­a­tive AI as a valu­able asset both for the busi­ness val­ue it can unlock and for the role it can play in com­bat­ting an SAP skills short­age. He rec­om­mends lever­ag­ing the new tech­nolo­gies to help recruit peo­ple into the SAP ecosystem. 

“In order to be effec­tive with the new tech­nolo­gies, you have to learn the foun­da­tions,” he said, ​“and you have to learn the foun­da­tion­al tech­nolo­gies of SAP.”

For more from ASUG Tech Con­nect, read our cov­er­age of the day-one and day-two and keynotes, an inter­view with Jabil’s IT Direc­tor Cyn­thia Kendall on Jabil’s S/4HANA migra­tion, new columns by the Bor­ing Enter­prise Nerds and the SAP Cus­tomer Evo­lu­tion team, an inter­view with enter­prise archi­tect Syl­vain Gar­neau of Res­olute For­est Prod­ucts, and our pre-con­fer­ence inter­view with SAP CTO Juer­gen Mueller.