Hello everyone!
It took me a while longer to share a new blog with you guys than I planned, but what a year it has been.. So with a little delay, let's go!
In my first real blog about SAP education, I wish to address the fact that educating new SAP developers us presenting us with more and more challenges than it ever has. In future blogs I will address all these challenges in depth, but right now let's start with the biggest one!
SAP Tutors' biggest challenge!!
A little over 10 years ago, SAP courses all looked pretty similar.. The list of technologies that was taught was not that big, and the main focus was
ABAP. The SAP system was built mainly on this technology, and nearly all problems/demands could be solved with it. Building new programs or extending the standard, ABAP was more than often (part of) the solution.
Of course there were some other technologies to be used as well, (Java) webdynpro/SAPScript/.., but they were always considered little siblings of the big brother ABAP!
These days, I believe the biggest challenge is choosing the right technologies to teach, because that list of siblings has been growing exponentially, and I don't consider many of them as "little siblings" anymore.. And to be honest, I am dead certain this is a challenge I, as a teacher, will be faced with every year over again. The choices today are endless (even when we're only considering SAP technologies):
- ABAP
- CDS
- HANA
- XI/PI/PO/CPI
- BOPF/RAP/Fiori Elements
- UI5
- CAP
- BTP and all of its services: IoT/RPA/(conversational) AI/ ...
- And so on...
This is only a pretty general overview of possible SAP technologies, not even talking about how much in depth we can go in each of these technologies or the amount of technologies we can use when talking about Cloud Foundry.
What is (un)certain?
I think what we can all agree upon, is that for educating future developers, there is always too little time and too much we want to teach them. Therefor, as teachers, trainer and tutors, it is our responsibility to carefully consider our subjects and update them as often as possible.
It is certain, that tomorrows technology will look differently from today, it is also certain that it will change faster and faster. Just like Moore's law, predicting that the amount of transistors on a microchip will double every 2 years, the amount of possibilities and technologies we can utilize in software development also grows exponentially. Proof of this can be found in the fact that also SAP is no longer only developing SAP specific technologies, but is more and more allowing integration with open source technologies.
Leading us to what is uncertain these days.. The time where SAP developers were nearly equal to ABAP'ers is definitely in the past! But then what is an SAP developer? What is mandatory for an SAP developer, is it a skill, a technology, an insight, a mindset or something else?
What's next?
Questions like:
- What is the pupil's prior knowledge? (about SAP as well as about programming)
- How much time do we get to teach them?
- How many different technologies should we teach at least?
- Is ABAP dead? (one of the hottest topics nowadays, also VERY relevant here)
- What's the best starting point?
- ...
I think there are too many interesting factors that we need to take into account, and too many questions and challenges to cover them all in this blog. That's why I want to dedicate a series of blogs to this interesting topic where I welcome all opinions and feedback from the community..
I'm looking forward to take up this discussion with not only other trainers, but with all of you!!
Hope to hear from you, and see you guys in my next post!
Greets,
Yor
