Your Greatest Hits: How to Tailor Your SAP CV
Posted on March 2015 By Speller International
When it’s time to start exploring options for your next role, the first move you should always make is to the computer – so you can update your CV, of course!
It might sound obvious, but a great CV showcases all the very best things about you and details your strengths, achievements and accolades. It boosts your personal ‘brand’ and really markets you in the best possible light when it comes to impressing a prospective employer.
So how do you make sure your SAP CV has the best chance of falling on the ‘yes’ pile? Let’s take a look.
Get ‘Brand You’ up to scratch
Your resume is an extremely important personal asset and your best marketing tool. It can be the key to networking, landing interviews (formal and informational) and building your personal brand.
Making sure your CV showcases your brand perfectly can be done by:
Starting your CV with a carefully written professional summary. This includes is a well-rounded summary of your career, highlighting your key professional attributes and achievements that make you stand out from the rest.
Making sure you showcase all your talents and experience. There is a lot of conflicting information online about editing your CV, making sure it is a certain length and other such things. This advice is not necessarily appropriate for a SAP CV. Employers want to see your achievements, not your job description. Your resume should be about you, what you have achieved and most importantly about what you could bring to the new employer, but…
…Don’t go on and on. Try to make sure your CV is comprehensive, but snappy.
Show off your SAP chops
As you will be aware, SAP is a very specific industry with its own special terminology and skills sets. Your CV is the perfect place to acknowledge that you speak the language and have the necessary experience to smash any SAP assignment out of the ballpark.
Ways to show you have got the right stuff include:
Using SAP lingo. Clients will look for the key words and skills they are require for the role. A bonus tip is to include SAP in your job title (e.g. ‘SAP SD Senior Consultant’ as opposed to ‘SD Senior Consultant’) to show your role was SAP-specific.
Make sure you list the relevant SAP sub-modules you’ve worked in.
If you are a SAP Training Consultant, list the SAP modules Trained in with regards to Training roles (e.g. ‘experience in the following modules FICO/PM/QM…’). Also include how many years’ experience you have with having trained specific modules (e.g. ‘5 years’ experience in SAP PM Training’). List where you trained certain modules – kind of like an overall summary at the start of the CV and outline how much experience is training delivery and how much training development
When it comes to Change Managers, Hiring Managers like to know the size of the projects and how often/many stakeholders you had to deal with. Also, include problems you encountered on the project how you dealt with them.
If you are working in other areas such as in Corporate Services roles where using SAP is a large part of your role, make sure you say how many years experience you have had with SAP as this will stand out. Listing your role function (ie payroll officer, procurement officer etc) will not make your resume stand out, whereas having x number of years with SAP AND a strong role history will.
Hiring Managers like to see what the candidate has been doing, as opposed to what the team has been doing. A summary of your years in SAP and Training tools used and methodologies within the initial statement of your CV can work nicely for this (accompanied by more specific details in the body of your CV, of course).
The secret is in the details
Often, what will set your CV apart from the rest are small things like formatting, spelling and effective communication.
A few things you can do to ensure you tick these boxes are:
For all CVs, regardless of the industry, it is crucial to have a clean and well-constructed layout, maintaining consistent fonts and styles.
List your roles in order, most recent first, and highlight each company role in bold so they stand out.
Spell-check is a must! Having someone else read it is important too: you want to make sure that you have clearly described your background, skills, qualifications and accomplishments so that anyone can understand it.
Use bullet points rather than large sentences to make your point (see what we did there?).
Highlight your results and achievements in each role. Utilising bullet points under the headings ‘Key Responsibilities’ and ‘Key Achievements’ makes it obvious for anyone to appreciate the impact you made during your time at a company.
Let the world know you’re ready to work
This might seem a bit boring, but it can be the difference between getting called to interview and falling out of sight.
Showing you are ready to work means doing things like:
Including a note with your work rights on your CV, e.g. Australian Citizen, Australian Permanent Resident, New Zealand Permanent Resident or 457 Visa.
Changing the settings on your ‘online CV’, LinkedIn, to show you are open to discussing new opportunities. If appropriate, update your Twitter bio and other online channels to reflect this, also.
A few final notes
We’re almost there! We’re sure you’re getting impatient to start hammering out the greatest CV you’ve ever written in your life but, before you get writing, we have just two more tiny pointers for you.
Be prepared to tweak and modify your CV to better reflect the specific skills required for each role. This one is crucial because it shows you in the best possible light.
If you’ve had time off between contracts you might like to include comments about upskilling you did during that time to keep relevant in your module. Everyone has times when they are not working. Showing you were proactive during these times highlights your work ethic and positions those downtime periods as active training periods – the perfect way to put a positive spin on a bit of quiet time.
So there you go! Sadly, there is no surefire method to make 100% sure you’ll be successful in every application you submit, but a well-written SAP CV can definitely make sure you are showing your true self to a Hiring Manager – which means that, when you are successful, the role you get will be a true perfect match.