jon.reed/blog is an SAP Mentor and the President of JonERP.com - he blogs, Tweets and podcasts on SAP skills and market trends.
Martin Gillet SAP Consultant, SAP trainer and SAP MentorBelgium
Michael Koch, SAP Mentor and Independent SAP Consultant.
Working in IT since 1990, I've been involved in the SAP arena since 1997. Doing the needful.
leonardo.araujo/blog has been a SAP Logistics Functional and Technical consultant for more than 12 years. Based in Montreal-Quebec, Canada.
It is almost four months since the Certification Five paper: SAP Certification: The Certification 5 Report was published on SDN. Since that time, there has been a tremendous amount of feedback on SDN, via email, at LinkedIn and other places. All good stuff representing valuable additions to an important debate.
It is clear that passions run deep on this topic but if we are honest, much of what we are seeing amounts to a collection of anecdotal evidence which is difficult to disseminate on a meaningful basis. We felt the time has come to get a bit more scientific about this and discover more about the implications of Certification both now and going forward.
One of our prime objectives in developing the survey has been an attempt to be as objective as possible. That is difficult given our position as advocates for change. After much agonizing, tweaking, discussion, rip, replace, rinse and repeat we think we've come up with something that will help everyone get a better sense of what people are thinking, whether Certified or not.
In an ideal world we'd get millions of responses. In reality we expect somewhat less although we will be using our best efforts to distribute the survey as far and wide as we possibly can. Apologies in advance if you are a member of subsidiary groupings in other communities and see us promoting this survey. However, we would like as many people as possible to participate so that we end up with something that not only provides a rich source of information but which can serve as the basis for any next steps. That means the survey is 'long run' - over the next couple of months.
Is the survey perfect? Of course not. Could we have gone further? Absolutely. On this occasion we are trying to keep the focus tight, making it of sufficient length that it has value but not so long that people get fed up of completing it. Juggling those parameters is tough but we think we've just about got there. It will take around 2 minutes to complete. Sadly we cannot offer any prizes or incentives to complete other than than your having the satisfaction of knowing that completing the survey is making a valuable contribution to a debate SAP Mentors, Certification Five geek out with Bill McDermott
Some might be thinking - why now? Having seen the growing success of SIT over the last few months and participated in lively debates around the topic at several SITs we saw a chance to kill three birds with one stone: Bangalore SIT is tomorrow - if you can't attend in person then check out the agenda. The afternoon is dedicated to C5 topics. We're presenting via Adobe Connect which will be pretty darned awesome given that Jon Reed will need to be up at 4.30am. Finally, with 53 registered attendees, we felt that this was a great audience with which to kick off the survey.
It should go without saying that the results will be made public and available to anyone who is interested in the topic. Early results will be all over the map so keep checking back.
We are both excited and nervous about the outcomes so have at it. Here's the survey link and thanks in advance.
Finally, we'd like to thank those among the community that have helped us iron out the survey bugs and made suggestions for improvement. You know who you are, give yourself a round of applause and beers are on us whenever we next meet.
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