Hello to everyone in the community, and especially to our Mobility-minded members!
Over the weekend, I was reviewing some job market trends in the Mobility space and reflected on the difficulty organizations are experiencing in filling those specialized developer positions. Then a random flash of recollection stormed into my consciousness: When Apple introduced the phrase, “There’s an app for that” in 2009, the company wasn’t exaggerating. The one millionth app hit the marketplace in December 2011 and that same month, the cumulative number of app downloads from major mobile platforms reached nearly 30 billion.
The growth isn’t only in consumer apps. Today, mobile apps for business are gaining even more popularity as organizations adopt BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies. Decision makers, operation managers and mobile workers now use mobile apps to increase productivity, reduce paperwork, and stay connected 24/7, no matter where they are.
What’s the bottom line? More apps = More jobs. So why is there a shortage of talent to develop them?
Let’s take a look at the numbers. “The App Economy” has grown from 0 jobs in 2007 to approximately 466,000 in the U.S. over the last year alone. Elance.com, a website for freelancers, reported that in the first quarter of 2011, there were 4,500 mobile developer jobs posted on its site. That’s a 101% increase over the previous year. Gartner predicts that mobile app development projects will outnumber PC application projects by 4 to 1 as early as 2015. Aisle50 co-founder and author Christopher Steiner summed up the situation for Fast Company: "If you look at who has the biggest opportunity in society right now, it’s developers.”
Are you ready to join the App Economy?
Today’s mobile workers play a huge role in most organizations’ success, and supporting these workers has become a strategic, integrated part of IT initiatives. Are you prepared to take on that role? With the right training and skills, you can become a key player in making enterprise mobility a reality for your organization. The question is not whether you have gone to a training class or hold a certification status. The real question is whether you have the fundamental skills to prepare and keep up with the explosive nature of the mobile app economy. The need for more developers is clearly out there.
Whether you need new skills or just an update to current skills, SAP Education can help. Enterprise mobility training and certification from SAP Education offers hands-on project team training. Our SAP experts provide instruction for mobility architects, mobile application developers and modelers, Sybase Unwired Platform administrators, and SAP Afaria mobile device management solution administrators. And of course, if you are a member of a middleware or backend integrations project team, SAP Education offers valuable training to help you better specify and implement the SAP backend system requirements as specified by your organization's Mobility Enterprise Architect.
I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed posting it. Having been a professional services engineer in a past life, I would have appreciated a sincere push for more structured learning and skilling. The mobility market is growing so rapidly that education will definitely go a long way for those new the mobility world, or for those who simply want to keep a fresh set of skills.
I would be very pleased to hear from anyone out there in the community who has taken our Mobility training. Please share your insights and experiences, or ask your questions right here in this post.
I wish you much success with SAP Mobility!
