What is SAP Experience?

Nowadays, one may notice that many job postings mention SAP experience as one of the requirements or nice to have skills of a candidate. People that are not familiar with SAP often have difficulties in understanding what is SAP experience and what do employers look for. In this blog post, we will concisely answer the question What is SAP experience? and will provide actionable recommendations about getting experience with SAP (if you have not had it yet).

What is SAP Experience?

In short, SAP experience means that a person has had experience of working with the ERP system called SAP. SAP is the most popular and advanced ERP system on the market. It is basically a software system coupled with a database that is used by companies to store data about its operations (like supply chain deliveries or accounting documents) and automate various business processes. More information about SAP can be found here: What is SAP? and here: How Does SAP Work? If a company uses SAP, most of its employees will need to interact with this system in certain way (either enter some data in SAP or refer to various reports from SAP). For this reason, it is really beneficial if a new employee already knows how to work with SAP and has some SAP experience. Previous SAP experience will help the new employee to faster integrate and get started at the new place of work.

For example, let us consider somebody who works in the finance department of a company where SAP is used. In this case, this person will need to enter and post all the accounting documents in SAP FI. SAP FI is the module of SAP dedicated to the financial accounting area. SAP has certain transactions for entering accounting documents and before using them it is necessary to have some training on SAP user interface, main concepts of organizational units in SAP, and accounting process in SAP. Working with SAP as a business user does not require very deep knowledge of SAP. It is sufficient to know the basic things and no background in IT is required.

While SAP experience could be very beneficial for a future job, in most of the cases it should not be considered as mandatory. If the job is not related to SAP consulting or SAP support, you will be able to quickly learn SAP at your workplace because you will only need to learn how to use several transactions and do not need to perform any configuration of SAP. Therefore, from our point of view, business experience of a candidate (e.g., in accounting or supply chain management) is much more important than her or his experience of working with SAP.

How to Get SAP Experience?

Having answered the question “What is SAP experience?” let us see how to get SAP experience if you never worked in a company that uses SAP. First of all, let me state it clearly that you should not worry too much about having SAP experience, if you do not work in IT area (SAP consulting or SAP support). If you still want to have SAP experience on your resume, the best option is to do the following:

1. Take very basic introductory course about SAP. Most of SAP Training providers offer this kind of training courses.
2. Perform some practical exercises in a real SAP system. There are various companies that offer remote access to demo SAP systems for training purposes. You can read more about them here: SAP IDES Access.

Summary

In this blog post, we discussed what is SAP experience and who needs it for being successful at job interviews. Our conclusion is that SAP experience is mandatory for people from IT area (SAP consulting or SAP support) but is not generally necessary for people from business areas (like accounting or human resources).