Quarterly Crunch Q2 18/19

Posted on February 2019 By Judy Cole
Quarterly Crunch Q2

Christmas is over and the new year’s planning has begun both on a personal and a business level.

Let’s have a look at how the SAP market/Speller team has performed for this past quarter (Q2) 18/19 financial year and hopefully this can give you some insights to assist with your planning.

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 Q1 (FY18/19) Quarterly crunch and here is Q2 for last year (financial year 17/18), just for fun!

You can see all of our Quarterly Crunches on our blog if you wish to dig deeper into the stats… exciting!

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 below and share your own thoughts.

So, let’s see how we went…

We just missed our target again this quarter achieving 90% of the company sales target. But, as you will see below, significantly better than the same quarter last year.

In regards to purely sales (sales = people placed within the SAP field in either contract or permanent engagements), Speller International placed 6% more people in Quarter 2 this year (Oct/Nov/Dec 2018) than we did in the previous Quarter 1 (July/Aug/Sept 2018).  By comparison, it was 63% more than the same Quarter the previous year (Oct/Nov/Dec 2017).

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

  • SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

  • SAP FICO

  • SAP HCM/SF/PY

  • SAP Project Managers

  • SAP Change Management

FYI Last quarter (Q1 FY18/19) … It was;

  • SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

  • SAP Project/Program Management

  • SAP Trainers

  • SAP Business Analysts

  • SAP BI/Hana

What % were permanent vs Contract in Quarter 2?

5.5% of the people we placed last Quarter were permanent (or fixed term) and 94.5% contract. Note; 14.7% of the people we placed in the previous Quarter (Q1) 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 in during the Quarter;

Speller International received a total of 92 vacant SAP job positions to fill throughout the Quarter, compared to the previous Quarter which was 109 vacancies (and 114 in Q2 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, 15% were permanent or fixed term engagements and 85% were contract requirements.

Top Requirements

  • SAP Project Manager

  • SAP Change Management/Analyst

  • SAP FICO

  • SAP HCM/SF/PY

  • SAP Training

  • SAP Testing

  • SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

  • SAP Architect

  • SAP Data (migration/master data & data governance)

  • SAP Ariba

FYI – the top 5 requirements from Q1 were;

  • SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

  • SAP Change Management/Analyst

  • SAP Testers

  • SAP Trainers

  • SAP CRM (inc C4C)

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

  • SAP Payroll

  • SAP EWM

  • Enterprise Architect’s

So that was our Quarter 2; our top placed SAP areas, SAP skills most required and permanent v’s contract data – all without any conclusion from us!

New Roles/Skills Emerging

We saw an increase of SAP Ariba and Data Architects.

Average Contract Length

Last Quarter the average initial contract length drop slightly to 17  weeks (this does not take into account extensions), in Q1 at 19.5 and Quarter 4’s (last year) average of 19.11 weeks.

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