What SAP Pros Learned in 2019, And How It Can Help You in 2020

It’s that time of year again…the year is almost over and we’re busy wrapping up things, reviewing our goals, assessing progress on plans and milestones. Most importantly, we look at all the students’ activity throughout the year. What have the 1000s of SAP professionals focused their time on?

Over 30,000 SAP learners from 120+ countries have completed almost 500,000 training sessions on our platform so far. What did your peers learn? What were the hottest SAP topics this year?

We analyzed almost 100,000 training records to find out what was hot this year and what people really wanted to learn.

SAP Learning in 2019

First, we grouped all training courses by category to find the major fields of study in 2019. The most popular topics this year were:

1. Basic SAP Skills (fundamentals, navigation, reporting, SAP GUI)
2. ABAP
3. Supply Chain / Logistics
4. Financials

The ABAP category was a bit unexpected to us since the last few years were dominated by SAP fundamentals followed by SAP Financials and then Supply Chain Management topics.

Most Popular Courses by Topics

Basic SAP Skills

The most popular topic area this year was Basic SAP Skills – no surprise here (and same as last year). The need for fundamental SAP skills keeps increasing as more and more companies use SAP software to run their businesses.

Specifically, the hottest courses in this area are (we call them the ‘Fabulous 5’):

1. Basic SAP Skills
2. Intermediate SAP Skills
3. Basic SAP Reporting Skills
4. Intermediate SAP Reporting Skills
5. Installing the SAP GUI

SAP students in this category are top power learners, enrolling in more courses and completing more lessons than the average student.

SAP ABAP

The 2nd most popular topic this year was SAP ABAP – everything related to programming & coding in SAP. Specifically, the following courses were most popular among our technical learners:

1. Introduction to ABAP 7.4 in S/4HANA
2. Debugging ABAP for Functional Teams
3. ABAP Programming Best Practices

SAP Supply Chain / Logistics

Coming in next is the topic of SAP Supply Chain Management / Logistics. This is an area of vast scope and thus, attracted a lot of students throughout the year. The most popular courses in this area were:

1. S/4HANA Order-to-Cash Process
2. 21 Steps Purchase Process Cycle in S/4HANA
3. S/4HANA Materials Management Introduction

SAP Financials

The SAP Financials area came in as #4, although almost as strong as the Logistics area. The scope of this area is huge, too, encompassing 1000s of SAP lessons – another reason why so many SAP students enrolled in courses in this topic. The most popular courses were:

1. Product Cost Controlling: End-to-End Scenarios
2. Material Ledger / Actual Costing: End-to-End Scenarios
3. S/4HANA Central Finance Enhancements

Business Productivity

And last, but certainly not least, was the topic of Business Productivity – a new topic for us that we added to our course library this year for the first time. In a bit of a surprise to us, it was tremendously popular with our students and scored the # 5 spot in our ranking this year.

The most popular courses in this area were:

1. Complete Excel 2019 for Beginners
2. Excel 2019 Advanced
3. Getting & Writing IT Requirements in a Lean / Agile World

Top SAP Instructors

We’re proud of the 100s of expert SAP instructors that teach on our platform. They are expert SAP professionals, consultants, authors and seasoned speakers – simply the best of the best.

The top instructors this year are:

1. Raju Shrestha – teaches ABAP
2. Simon Calder – teaches Excel & PowerPoint
3. Matt Hunt – teaches Ariba & Supply Chain
4. Rob Leathem – S/4HANA Financials
5. Arghadip Kar – teaches ABAP & Development
6. Pramod Bangalore – teaches S/4HANA Logistics
7. Yoann Bierling – teaches English & French Ariba
8. Tommi Riihimaki– teaches S/4HANA Financials
9. Tom Hathaway – teaches Lean / Agile
10. Greg Olynyk – teaches Plant Maintenance & Document Management

A Year in Review

We are continuously impressed by the will and determination of our SAP students, and as we start planning for 2020, we are even more confident that SAP skills are an important professional asset.

Over 500,000 SAP training courses have been completed on our platform and we’re not planning on slowing down any time soon. Whether you’re a seasoned professional looking to hone your skills, or you’re entering the workforce and toying with the idea of working with SAP, there is ALWAYS something new to be learned.

Our hope is that you can leverage these findings to help you reach your own personal and professional SAP goals in the new year.

2020 is a fantastic year to learn SAP. Will there ever be a year that ISN’T a good year to learn SAP? We personally don’t think so, but we are excited to see how SAP trends and learning patterns will adjust and change going forward. And when they do, we’ll make sure that you’re the first to find out.

Happy learning!