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​The new financial year is in full swing and I cannot believe Christmas is looming! Let’s have a look at how the SAP market/Speller team has performed for this first quarter of the 18/19 financial year.

What skill did we place most of? What skill was highly sort after? Is the SAP market hot, or not?

Place your bets because it’s time to find out…

For your own comparison here is my Q4 (FY17/18) Quarterly crunch and here is Q1 for last year (financial year 17/18) just for fun!

You can see all of our Quarterly Crunches on our blog.

As a recap, we give you Speller International’s actual sales for the quarter. I don’t share my own opinions (or excuses!) 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 share your own thoughts.

So, let’s see how we went.

Not a great quarter for us… we only hit 85% of our Quarter Target.

In regards to purely sales (sales = people placed within the SAP field in either contract or permanent engagements), Speller International placed 12.8% less people in Quarter 1 this year (July/Aug/Sept 2018) than we did in the previous Quarter 4 (April/May/June 2018).  By comparison, it was 23% less than the same Quarter the previous year (July/Aug/Sept 2017).

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

• SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

• SAP Project/Program Management

• SAP Trainers

• SAP Business Analysts

• SAP BI/Hana

FYI Last quarter (Q4 FY17/18) it was;

• SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

• Data Analysts

• SAP Basis

• SAP Trainer

• SAP Project Manager

What % were permanent vs Contract in Quarter 1?

14.7% of the people we placed last Quarter were permanent (or fixed term) and 85.3% contract. Note; 13.07% of the people we placed in the previous Quarter (Q4) 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 the number of requirements we received during the Quarter;

Speller International received a total of 109 vacant SAP job positions to fill throughout the Quarter, compared to the previous Quarter which was 75 vacancies (and in 103 in Q1 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, NZ and the UAE.

Of those vacant positions we received, 10% were permanent or fixed term engagements and 90% were contract requirements.

Top Requirements

• SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

• SAP Change Management/Analyst

• SAP Testers

• SAP Trainers

• SAP CRM (inc C4C)

• SAP Project/Program Managers

• SAP Business Analyst

• SAP P2P/Ariba

• SAP Basis

• SAP EWM

FYI – the top 5 requirements from Q4 were;

• SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

• SAP Business Analyst

• SAP Change Manager

• SAP Project Manager

• SAP Trainer

Most difficult skill set to find for Quarter 1 (in no particular order)

• SAP Ariba

• SAP Fieldglass

• Enterprise Architect’s

• SAP Fiori (Functional)

So that was our Quarter 1. Our top placed SAP areas, SAP skills most required and permanent vs contract data – all without any conclusion from us!

New Roles/Skills Emerging

We saw an increase of SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass roles emerge last quarter

Average Contract Length

Last Quarter we continued our extremely good average initial contract length of 19.5 weeks (this does not take into account extensions), which is pretty much on par with Q4 at 19.11 and Quarter 3’s average of 19.68 weeks

What’s in store for the next Quarter? Stay tuned for the next instalment of our Quarterly Crunch!