Meet Michael Management instructor Rob Leathem, an SAP certified professional with 17 years’ international ERP experience. Rob specializes in the SAP Financials & Controlling (FICO) modules. You may already have taken one of the SAP courses Rob created for Michael Management. In his courses, Rob makes use of his SAP career experience which has taken him all over the world and across multiple industries including high-tech, manufacturing and media.
Rob became an online SAP instructor earlier this year and has already created 3 online courses so far. In this blog Rob will explain why he decided to become an instructor and how the course creation process works. A good analogy for what we can do together is the publishing industry. You, the SAP training instructor, are the book author and we, MMC, are the publisher. You ‘write’ or create your course once and then we publish and market your course to our thousands of students and share the revenue with you.
I asked Rob how he came to be an instructor for MMC.
“I wanted to give back to the industry that I have worked in for many years,” he says. “And I have always enjoyed the training aspect of SAP and keeping in touch with what customers in the industry are looking for.”
Having created previous financial course content for MMC, Rob was in a perfect position to test out the new, more open MMC learning platform, where instructors can upload their own content, which debuted early in 2017.
What does Rob get out of being an MMC instructor?
“The main benefit is the creative process, seeing your course come to life and being actively used on the MMC website,” he replies. “The MMC team are great to work with, so building those relationships with them has been a great personal experience.”
What’s key for all would-be instructors is knowledge of and enthusiasm for their chosen SAP topic along with an engaging presentation style. Instructors must also be able to convey the complexity of SAP technologies in easy-to-understand terms. In other words, no buzzwords!
Many would-be SAP instructors think about potential topic choices and how best to structure their SAP training courses. Rob has some great advice on both areas.
“Pick an area that plays to your strengths and experience,” he says. “Come up with a course outline and ‘pitch it’ to the MMC team for approval before you generate detailed content.”
In terms of what to include (and what to omit) from a course, Rob suggests concentrating on the students’ needs.
“Think about who your audience is and what they want to learn,” he says, and then ask yourself, “What value can I add?”
He cautions that any SAP training course should not be primarily designed to show off the instructor’s own knowledge. Instead, think about what people struggle with the most, where they make the most mistakes, and what tips and tricks can help them succeed with SAP.
Another area people worry about is the amount of time they might have to spend creating a new SAP training course. For Rob, his first course took approximately four weeks to create, but developing subsequent courses has been a much quicker process. Having a plan in place is very helpful and Rob shares his own seven-step process here:
Rob has already created a very successful ‘boot camp’ series of SAP Finance courses and is planning to add additional courses in the near future.
You can learn more in our SAP instructor video and then apply as a new SAP Instructor. Not only will you be using your talents to help thousands of people around the world improve their knowledge of SAP but you’ll also receive an ongoing royalty check every month.