Once Upon a Time, there was an ABAP Developer, The Hero :-). He loved debugging, he loved team leading activities, mentoring teams and, Oh boy! - He did love to be part of S/4HANA projects.
With all the newer technologies, and all the buzz words around, he constantly searched and read all the good technical materials & kept himself updated.
One fine morning, he said to himself, "I Love to talk functional consultant's language too", "I love to brainstorm with functional guys about different scenarios possible in a RICEF object"...and then, our Hero is convinced that he needs to learn at least one functional area or a small part of it. And just like any other Hero, he had positive attitude who always thought that no knowledge is ever a waste!!
So far so good...
Now, I am sure all the technical people reading this, would agree that reading functional topics, business topics would be bit heavy to grasp because – We, The Developers are a breed who love to see things really happening in the system...and how? Of course, in debugging 🙂 How could our Hero learn a functional area, gain knowledge about different customizing settings - and that too via debugging?? Hard, isn't it?
and then, he says: -
"How can I, unless someone explains it to me?"
Thankfully, the company he works for, had subscription for the
Learning Hub. He had visited the Learning Hub few times but never had he explored it thoroughly. Also, since he had heard about the
BETA version of Learning Hub in the
SAPPHIRE NOW, he was certain he could get something that can help kick start his learning Journey.
He ventures into Learning Hub, feels nice about the new completely revamped UX. He explores further - and lands at "Learning Rooms" which are dedicated to specific topics. "Great!", he says. He quickly finds the learning room for the functional scope that he wanted to learn. He gets a load of ppt, Q&A, Guides & Templates, Overview slides...and finally, his eyes lit up when he sees the "LIVE SESSIONS" section.
Scene: Hero is in the Live sessions section with eyes wide open
The first thing that catches his eye is the "Upcoming Sessions" section and just below that he finds the "Go to Events" which loads up the monthly calendar of all the live sessions hosted.
After scanning the page and the content, he realizes that Live sessions are not like 30 min story, where you join, hear the overview and probably, leave it there. These Live sessions are
- Dedicated classroom like virtual training for all the enrolled participants.
- Experts on that topic explain us the topic with so much passion, so much involvement!
- There are sessions with at least 4 hours timespan and some sessions span across 5 days - 2 hours/day.
- There are many sessions in just 1 month timespan.
- You could choose from multiple sessions scheduled across time zones.
and, and, and--- there are hands-on sessions too where you get access to the relevant systems, stepwise guides to do what is required.
If you have missed any session, there are certainly the recordings of these also available. Go, find the relevant recording, and listen to what the experts say!
Now - think for a while - An expert talking to you - teaching you a new topic - you have the full freedom to ask as many questions as possible to clarify your most basic doubts too...Wouldn't it Kick start your learning Journey with a bang? Wouldn't it make your learning journey simple and exciting?
Well, Our Hero certainly thinks so! He enrolls for one of sessions, excitingly jumps on to complete the pre-requisites and pulls up his calendar to make way for the super exciting Live sessions. He is sure he will enjoy it because that is what he was looking for! Someone talking him through the knowledge and he just grasps all the knowledge, just like the below image!
Morale of the Story: -
Learning Hub offers lot of Live sessions which can make your learning simpler, quicker and will surely make you & your knowledge
Relevant in this every changing SAP world.
And of course, of course! It serves across all SAP products, not just for technical people who are wanting to learn functional scope, as said in the story.
How to find List of Sessions in the current Setup?
Go the
HOME page of the learning hub which looks something like this. The 2 tiles of our interest are already pointed at in the below screenshot.
The
"Live Sessions" tile will take you to a powerful search to find live sessions of your choice.
The
"Download Catalog" tile downloads a list of excel sheet containing loads of learning hub information.
Move to sheet 8 in the excel workbook to find the entire list of Live sessions.
What Next?
I am sure there are some eyes from the "Learning Hub" team who will read this. This story does tell a lot about SAP's focus on Learning. But, I do you see scope for improvement, especially in the area of Live Sessions, because:
I happen to attend one Live session for a very hot topic and there were only 8 participants. I was so surprised and shaken as to how is it possible that SAP provides such a treasure to all the learning Hub subscribers and there are not many takers?? There can be many, many professionals who are just like the Hero in the story, who wants the topic to be explained, so that they have the right starting point. Why such people are not in these live sessions? Is it that they are not aware that such a thing exists?...It could be!
What can done to have more people attend ?
The path to the live sessions is via the learning room, and probably that is a hindrance. I believe there are many people who look up for the certification based learning content and do not move around.
The
first problem to solve is to make the audience aware about the importance of Learning Rooms. How??..
- May be have a relevant question in the "Developers Survey"? or
- Put the Live sessions as reference material against the global certifications in training.sap.com
- Personalize the experience of the user by auto-suggesting based on how he accesses different contents.
Second is: Let people know that they have experts driven Live Sessions. Again, the question is How??…How about getting the eye balls to see some flashy section right at the top of the HOME page of learning hub. That section will contain the whole list of all the live sessions, across all the rooms. It could probably work !
I genuinely feel, there could be many people who might not know about Live sessions...and once they come to know, they will know what Learning Hub truly offers!
Signing off!
Thanks to all the future Heroes for reading it!
🙂