I have been in SAP world for past 10+ years (my entire IT career), started in the service industry, working for a consulting firm as a functional consultant and 5 years ago joined my current employer working as Technology Architect mainly in SAP area with a current TC of 140K. Since I am in Seattle, I understand that others here are making a lot more than I am and have a huge potential to increase their TC further. Whereas in SAP and the related world I do not see too much scope for TC increase, instead SAP skills would soon be legacy skills or might already be a legacy skill. My objective is to increase my TC. Since I do not have any development skills (as I do functional work), I wanted to know if someone can provide inputs on how to approach the move out of SAP skillset? I am willing to spend some time and learn something new, but given my lack of Dev skills, I am not sure how to go about it. On other threads, I have read the recommendation on practicing LC and trying for FANG, but again without any coding experience, not sure if that applies in my case. Should I try learning ML/AI online? Or maybe something else. 10 years ago when I entered IT, SAP was hot, not anymore. I fear that I have I have missed out on opportunities, and want to make a change, but not sure what my options could be. Posting a serious query, and hoping for some inputs from the forum. Thanks! P.S: I am Indian on H1B.
You keep saying you don’t have dev skills rather than being ready to learn that first. I would suggest picking up coding before any of ML/AI stuff. Pick up the cracking the coding interview book first and have a go at it. It’s has lots of basics and starts from ground up. And once you feel confident in it then start doing leetcode along with whatever ML/AI stuff you are interested in and start doing interviews concurrently. Good luck!
This is new, i didn't think about starting to code at this stage, untill now. Thanks for the helpful advice and book recommendation, will definitely look into this
You don’t think you can because you don’t think you can ;) I think you can
Since you have experience in Tech, but not exactly coding, have you thought about going for a PM role in tech? The typical Product Management roles are still difficult to break into, but roles such as the Program Manager in Microsoft are probably going to be okay for your experience. From what I have heard, PMs and devs make similar TC at Microsoft.
Yes, program management is an option that i am looking into. Still need to work out if its Specialty Occupation for H1B. Thanks for ur inputs
Try Gcp or azure. Both are looking for those knowing sap. Once in you can easily transfer to a different specialty
Thanks for confirming this. I am lookkng at enhancing my skills to make this move. This seems to me like a viable option.
I am in similar situation. I posted earlier about my dilemma. One thing about responses here : they are same as people responded on my thread. That’s encouraging. At least gives us newbies different ideas we can explore
I am also trying to learn coding from the scratch to make a switch into a domain that's in demand. I am a data analyst, which is a dying profession. I would suggest looking into datacamp courses, they work the way up from the very basic level.
I’d say you’re in a good spot to switch more into a data scientist/dataOps position - you have the subject matter expertise, now you need coding experience. Focus on Python with a bit of R and Scala and you should be good. The amount of “data scientists” that I’ve encountered in the last few years who are pure coders with no data management basic skills is astounding! I’d love to have found more people with actual data management skills and who were eager to learn coding than a coder who thinks he knows better than anyone else but thinks that concepts like data access control or encryption at rest are “legacy” things. That’s why it’s so hard to actually make ML/AI truly achieve anything in a corporate environment... few projects go beyond the science fair state, and I blame the people...
Thanks. Yes, I work on data all day, mostly data analytics and some data science. But like you mentioned, the market is flooded with coders who want to get into ML. And it's getting increasingly difficult for people like us who are not engineers but come from an analytics background to move into ML/AI. I have noticed that for an ML role, companies usually prefer an level 8 engineer with a level 2 knowledge of data analytics over someone with level 8 analytics knowledge but level 2 knowledge of engineering. It's been very hard lately to move into a good data science/ML role with an analytics background.
Giving a bit different perspective, you can definitely increase your TC even if you don’t leave the SAP ecosystem. Also, make sure you’re attached to the newer SAP technologies (there’s plenty of ML/AI within the context of SAP Apps now, Hana/data hub on kubernetes etc) and not just ABAP/ECC legacy stuff. Also, if you have experience in designing and setting up SAP landscapes on cloud infrastructures, there’s a huge demand for that. In short, I’d recommend you get out of the SI/body shop world and either go work for some customer directly (as a SAP architect initially but it’ll expand your horizons into diff technologies) - as a reference, a few years back I was offered a 250k TC job to be a SAP COE director at T-Mobile in Seattle, so the jobs are there, you just have to have the right experience and determination - or another option is to go in the SAP Solution Architecture teams at some cloud provider. Amazon has most of their SAP SAs in Seattle, and GCP and Azure are also hiring folks with SAP technology background but who have cloud experience and are tech savvy to help them move SAP workloads from OnPrem to the Cloud. I hope that helps.
@nerd1: Thanks a lot for these valuable inputs, they do help. I am currently working for end customer/client as an architect, still do more functional work. But i agree expanding to different SAP technologies, within the organization and then making a move is also a good idea. Thanks again, and sorry for delayed response, i was away so checking blind after a while
You can get into Program Management and make the switch.
Thanks, sounds feasible.