Hi Successfactors, you are now a SAP company
Yesterday, I saw a posting in the HCM forum,enquiring about SF and how one can get trained on SF. It made me to think, why it should be difficult to get trained on SF. I have taken couple of training conducted by SF.
This is my experience about SF trainings:
On their website, they have a listing of training programmes that are available. I went ahead and registered my self for a few of them and completed 2 of them. A few weeks back, I received an e-mail from SF training dept, that my registration is cancelled. The reason being, SF has a policy that trainings are offered only to partners and customers.
At this point, only verified customers/partners can take our training programs. Due to this policy, we have gone ahead and cancelled all your registrations and process the refund as well.
But nowhere on the website, does it say that trainings are open only for customers / partners.
One of the secrets to SAP success is , SAP Education offerings and the large pool of trained personnel. Companies and SI’s invest by sending their employees to these programmes. I have attended few of them and they are very impressive.
Now that SF is a SAP company, wouldn’t it be wise to offer trainings to a wider audience. It will be bad, if a on-premise consultant with years of implementation experience cannot transition to SF or implement SF due to lack of proper training. In any implementation, knowledge of software (SAP or SF) is only a small portion, the larger portion is the knowledge of the business processes and helping the customer gain value adds from the implementation. Due to lack of proper SF training, the market might loose such consultants.
My request to SAP – As part of the integration process, can SF training be opened up. There is already a success story in SAP Education. It should not be difficult to implement the same at SF. Better still, it will be great if the training departments are integrated and brought under one umbrella.
Another request is, a forum on SF. Here at SCN, we share our experiences and learn from one another. Why is SF customer forum, currently restricted? Can SCN reach out to SF and bring them under this umbrella.
The key to the success of the integration and greater acceptance, is a large pool of trained SF workforce. Today, that is being a challenge.
I am currently humming “How do I get trained on SF”? Any suggestions?
Great topic and you cover a lot of complaints I have heard over the past 6 months.
While I very much agree that anyone should be able to get SuccessFactors training and Certification it is not out of the norm to only allow partners to have access as that is the model Workday is using as well. When I started SAP back in 1998 I had to go through a partner to be able to go to the partner academy and get official SAP training and certification as well. That said will the amount of opportunities that are going to be in the marketplace it would make sense for SAP/SuccessFactors to think big picture as many of the most well known experts in the SAP HCM OnPremise world do not currently work for SuccessFactors Partners. While there are "ways around it" to get training it seems like it would make sense for the SAP Education group to step so this could be a real win/win/win (SAP & SF/Customers/Consultants)
Luke Marson has tried repeatedly to get a SuccessFactors group on SCN which I think is badly needed and would be a good step forward (hopefully Mark Yolton can jump in)
In the interim you should put this post in either SAP HCM or Cloud to get more exposure)
Do you have any statistics on how popular cloud offerings are outside the US - in Europe, Asia or Australia for example. SAP's ByD and RDS offerings are doing very well in some of these regions. If there are more trained / experienced SF workforce, SAP will see an increased uptick in SF implementations in these regions. The earlier the training programmes are expanded, the greater will be worry free implementations.
I dont believe the ByD HCM has very much adoption anywhere in the world but dont have the specific numbers (SAP likes to keep low sales very quiet) but do agree that a more trained SuccessFactors ecosystem is a good thing for everyone.
Thanks Venki for bring it to notice
Nice post Venki ,
Infact , I too had a bad luck when I visted SF website more than couple of times , there were no programs / Trainings schedule for 2012 year in Europe region. It is really disappointing for many aspiring SAP consultants.
I agree with you.
Hi Venki,
You make some valuable points here. The problem we have in Europe is that very little training is actually provided. I think SuccessFactors have so much demand right now that they simply cannot meet it. Their main market is in the US and I know of several people that have taken this training.
Regarding a SuccessFactors Space on SCN, I can tell you that there won't be one. I was involved in the SCN discussions about this and the decision was made that SuccessFactors comes under HCM. There might need to be more education from SCN that this is the place, but this is how it's going to be.
Best regards,
Luke
When SF integration is completed, it will be nice if SAP / SCN can re-consider starting a Cloud forum in SCN. Else, we really do not have forum where implementation teams can discuss or learn from each other.
Hi Venki,
There is already a SAP Cloud Computing space on SCN for technical questions. I expect integration questions can go into the HCM space like all technical questions for HCM do.
Best regards,
Luke
Thanks for the info Luke