Dice.com - Job Search Engine

You may be wondering why we are stopping by Dice.com, a job search engine. Dice is the best aggregator of SAP jobs on the web, especially contract jobs.

This is incredibly useful to us as we try to determine which SAP skills are actually in demand NOW. The trap we run into sometimes is chasing hot skill areas that SAP customers don't yet need. So, it's incredibly useful to be able to search on certain SAP skills and see what the actual market demand is within the Dice.com listings.

You know how there is all this buzz over "mashups"? Well, you can think of Dice.com as a kind of mashup for you to find out what SAP skills are needed - and it's all free.

Of course, the exact results are going to vary, but let me give you an example I tried today. I ran a search on "BW," and got 700 results. Then, I ran a search on "BI and SAP" and got more than 1,000 results. Obviously, there is likely some overlap between these two results groups. Third, I ran a search on "APO" and got just over 400 results.

Compare that with the results from two new SAP buzzwords. A search on "xApps," a heavily hyped SAP area, gets only 12 results. Of course, some individual xApps may not have that listed in the job descriptions, but the point is that this area of work has not gained market traction. Then, I tried "eSOA," another hyped SAP term pertaining to the new Enterprise Services Architecture, and got only two results. Now, this does not mean that the future of SAP is going to be heavily impacted by eSOA.

All SAP consultants will need to learn these skills eventually. The point is that right now, pursuing eSOA at the expsense of skills more in demand might be a questionable decision. The balance between the skills of the present and the future is the key. Dice can give us some very important data on this.