I agree with your post here. During my career as an SAP consultant, I have seen excellent non-certified SAP consultants and at the same time poorly performing certified SAP consultants.

The problem is that certifications alone do not guarantee that you will perform well. And most of the SAP certified institutes rely on folks who are good on instructions but don’t have the real life experience.

Simply because folks with real good experience and understanding of SAP prefer to do consulting as opposed to training.

Like Fays mentioned above it is the real life project experience and enrichment that creates a good consultant and value to the client. So the question then becomes how you tap the knowledge of an experienced consultant to enrich the learning of another.

As I feel consultants can provide the best training and knowledge if it is easy enough to do and there is a financial incentive to do the same.

It is for this reason, I started SpinAct to share and redistribute one’s knowledge in a productized way.

See my earlier post on this:

http://blog.spinact.com/knowledge_as_a_service/2008/11/users-rate-sap-consultants-and-partners-online.html

Look forward to having you all on SpinAct as we build the Knowledge Marketplace of the future.

http://www.spinact.com/account/signup

Best,
Monty

I took the SOA 200 training, which is rather conceptual, as it relates to Enterprise Architecture.

For this course, we had two guys doing the training. One, which is a colleague, and he’s fine, he knows his job. For 2.5 days we’ve learned interesting stuff. And then we had another guy, from a partner consulting company.

This guy had no damn idea about what he was talking about. At a point, he ended up showing us his own slides instead of the regular training content. It was a great waste. And the training was given within SAP.

I wondered if it was me, as I had a rather good knowledge of the area, or did the other participants have the same feeling. I was conforted to have a similar feedback.

SAP Training’s excuse: course is too recent, there are not enough people who master these things.

The certification in itself assesses your capacity in assessing information learned and reusing it. But I think, what people might expect from a training is above what’s in the book and comes from the trainer’s experience. That’s the real enrichment that allows you to get sometimes better at doing a specific task, as you take advantage from this experience. But this is definitely not written in the certificate.

Of course SAP can’t take the whole blame for this, but they have certified this institute for these kinds of trainings.
There is certainly room for some improvement here.