ABAP Certification -- A complete and UTTER waste of time.

[Former Member]

I see loads of questions - especially from total 100% newbies asking about ABAP certification.

I've been an external consultant for a lot of years and can only say that IMO ABAP certification is a TOTAL 100% waste of time.

The only people who ever do it usually are the worst abappers I've ever seen -- their code is horrible and spaghetti like and usually shows little understanding of the actual business process the code is meant to solve.

ABAP in anycase has less importance as modern technologies provide other business solutions so I would expect the "pure abapper" to be "not long for this world".

Most functional consultants can do sufficient abap these days and learning the business processes involved is much more important than any amount of "Canned Interview questions" learned by heart by many beginning abappers.

Cheers

jimbo

[Former Member]

Most functional consultants can do sufficient abap these days

I've met plenty who think they can.

[Former Member]

Hi Jimbo,

Did my certification a few years ago and found it to be of no use, but I already had a client base by this stage. But I wasn't aware that I had to be the worst ABAPper in history so maybe I missed the point.

Seriously though, it is a much better approach to do the 400/401 courses, get a couple of the SAPPress references and get a junior job. The interview question monkeys only get themselves into deeper water without the ability to swim. Having caught two on the job, there is no way these turkeys will ever work for me or with me again, so I wonder where getting the cribbed answers actually helped them.

Cheers

G

[Former Member]

Certifications are very useful...

for Software Vendors as a cash machine !

[Former Member]

Jimbo,

The problem in my opinion is the certification process itself. I have been in the ABAP world for 10 years. I was certified when I first started. If the certification process is still like it is today, then what typically happens is the newbies get sent off to ABAP training, then they somehow get through the certification soon after training, then they are let loose as developers. I think back to the first programs I wrote and can't believe somebody paid me for that work. They were as you described. The certification process also does not even account for any type of business process understanding unless you plan a career supporting airline reservations. So I think it is the companies who place importance on the certification that help perpetuate this.

In the past, I have had to review a lot of resumes for both external and internal resources. All things being equal, I have never used ABAP certification as a decision factor in our hiring.

IMO, I think that horrible code is also not just isolated to the ABAP world. Since we predominantly work in SAP, that is what we tend to focus on. But I bet if you look at any developer who is new to a programming language, their first endeavors into coding are alos horrible and spaghetti like. It takes quite a bit of time to master programming languages and you are going to have the same issues everywhere.

Best Regards,

Chris H.

[MarcelloUrbani]

>But I bet if you look at any developer who is new to a programming language, their first endeavors into coding are alos horrible and spaghetti like.

Maybe you meant "any developer who is new to any programming language". Expert developers tend to be structured with any language, even before they grasp the syntax.

>Most functional consultants can do sufficient abap these days

No, they can't.Some of them are able to, but unless we're talking of small amounts of trivial work it's a bad use of resources.

[ChrisSolomon]

You forgot to enclose your post in <rant> and </rant> tags. (kidding)

I wouldn't say "useless"....just "not of much weight". haha In the past, from my experience, any SAP certification (and similar to many other technical certifications out there) was merely "product certification" (and in the case of ABAP, "syntax certification") by and large. You were certified to know all about the product but nothing really about how to apply it in real world scenarios. I believe SAP has been working the past few years to change this, and from my understanding, the certification exams are more of the "solve this problem" type rather than "check the correct answer a,b or c". Sadly, the last certification I went through about 3 years ago was of the latter type and for portal/KW technical certification.....and it was pretty much just "product certification" where we were taught all the navigational areas, boxes to fill in, buttons to click, configuration, features, functions, etc, but no real practical applied knowledge. Hey....not SAP's fault though...they make the software/tools....it's what they do.

However, as SAP tries to fix this, I think the situation is getting worse....and we see it directly on here....where people are looking only to pass a certification in order to then land them a job having no real, hands-on, applied experience with SAP. What can be done in that situation?