Blog

​Judy is on leave this month so we’ve pulled together the stats and got her thoughts on the quarter before she jetted off to South America! As usual, please feel free to comment, share or contact us if you have any questions!

The third Quarter of the financial year is over and it was a mixed one! It started off really slow in January and picked up in February to a point where in some weeks we had (we hate to say it!) too many roles on to juggle. It’s a great sign of the work that’s happening and with just 3 months left in the financial year, we’re on track to meet our annual target.

So let’s look at the stats – What skill did we place most of? What skill was highly sort after? Place your bets because it’s time to find out and you can analyse the raw data as you wish.

For your own comparison here is Judy’s Q2 Quarterly crunch and here is Q3 for last year (financial year 15/16) just for fun!

As a recap, we give you Speller International’s actual sales for the quarter. We don’t share our own opinions or what we believe to be the reasons behind the results. Sometimes, especially in this online age, we hear too many opinions and it’s nice to be able to draw your own! But if you want our opinion then feel free to comment and ask and/or to share your own thoughts.

So, let’s see how we went…

In regards to purely sales (sales = people placed within the SAP field in either contract or permanent engagements), Speller International placed 22% more people in Quarter 3 this year (Jan / Feb / Mar 2017) than we did in the previous Quarter (Oct / Nov / Dec 2016). By comparison, it was 4.3% lower than the same Quarter the previous year (Jan / Feb / Mar 2016).

What are the top 5 roles we placed in the Quarter?

• SAP FICO

• SAP PM

• SAP HCM (incl SuccessFactors)

• SAP ABAP

• SAP BA

FYI Last quarter (Q2 FY16/17) … It was;

• SAP CRM (Functional & Technical)

• SAP Trainer

• SAP Project Manager

• SAP SD

• SAP HCM (incl SuccessFactors)

What % were permanent vs Contract in Quarter 3?

11.3% of the people we placed last Quarter were permanent (or fixed term) and 88.6% were contract. Note; 5% of the people we placed in the previous Quarter (Q2) were permanent.

How else can we measure how busy the market was?

While the number of people we placed is a good indication, it is not always the best indication for us to gauge how the market is/was performing. We also like to look at the number of requirements we received from our clients (requirements = vacant job positions which we are engaged to work).

Let’s look at number of requirements that we received in during the Quarter;

Speller International received a total of 133 vacant SAP job positions to fill throughout the Quarter, compared to the previous Quarter which was 118 vacancies (and 151 in Q3 last year). Those positions were across our 3 divisions (SAP IT, SAP Change and Training and SAP Corporate Services) as well as being across Australia and NZ.

Of those vacant positions we received, 21.8% were permanent or fixed term engagements and 78.2% were contract requirements.

Top 10 Requirements

• SAP ABAP (incl Lead)

• SAP BA

• SAP Project Management

• SAP FICO (incl Lead)

• SAP Tester (incl Lead)

• SAP Training and Communication

• SAP Solution/ Enterprise Architect (incl P2P, Data, PM)

• SAP Data Migration

• SAP PM

• SAP PO

• SAP HR/PY (incl Lead)

FYI – the top 5 requirements from Q2 were;

• SAP Tester (incl Test Lead)

• SAP Change (incl Change Analyst, Change Manager & Change Lead)

• SAP HCM (incl SuccessFactors)

• SAP ABAP

• SAP BA

Most difficult skill set to find for Quarter 3 (in no particular order)

• SAP SuccessFactors

• SAP EWM

• SAP HANA Architect

• SAP WPB

• SAP Enterprise Architect

So that was our Quarter 3; our top placed SAP area, SAP skills most required and permanent vs contract data – all without any conclusion from us!

New Roles/Skills Emerging

Continuing on from last Quarter, we had a lot of “Lead Roles”. There has been a strong need and lots of discussions for the “Business Analyst” skill set; although not technically an “Emerging” skill, we are seeing BA’s required in the new areas. HCI is also very busy and in demand.

Average Contract Length

Last year Judy introduced a new fun stat on the average initial contract lengths for the Quarter.

We started the year with a very strong average initial contract length of 17 weeks and in Quarter 2 it was down to 13 weeks, still a strong initial average contract length. This Quarter we had an extremely strong average initial contract length of 20 weeks! It will be interesting to see how we finish off the year in our next Quarterly Crunch.