Radoslaw Chudziak’s excellent blog post Learning Frustrations of an SAP Developer went practically viral on SAP Community recently. Keeping up with all the stuff SAP has been coming up with is like trying to keep your feet planted on two ice floes that are rapidly drifting apart. There are multiple IDEs, 3 co-existing ABAP Programming models, HANA, UI5, Cloud, you name it.
Constant learning is a given for the developers but, as the blog post correctly points out, the learning content does not align with real-life expectations:
The bottom line is that we have to deliver real world solutions which are more complex than all these “develop SAPUI5 app in 5 minutes” or using the famous Flight data model. We also work under time pressure as per estimates and don’t really have time to dive into standard SAP code for a few days to figure out how to do stuff.
I have written before about the new SAP Learning site which is prettier than Learning Hub but is lacking content. And it’s not just the question of content volume, it’s about content quality. One of the adult learning principles is “Adults are Practical”, we need to apply immediately what we are learning. And this is where SAP-sponsored content frequently fails to deliver beyond the simplest examples.
In the past, SAP professionals relied a lot on the community-generated content. But with the diminishing participation of active contributors in SAP Community and the unfortunate transformation of SAP Mentors program, we can no longer rely on the kindness of strangers. SAP needs to step up and provide simpler and more practical learning content, based on specific business scenarios that correspond to reality. JP
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