Earlier this week, I received an email from somebody asking for advise about SAP BusinessObjects upgrades, which I posted on the SAP Community – see State of the BusinessObjects BI4 Upgrade – October 2024. Today I received the following email from somebody that we’ll call “Jude”.
Hi Dallas,
My name is Jude and I am from Liverpool, England.
I hope you’re doing well.
I wanted to reach out for some advice on what direction I should take next in my learning journey.
Currently, my expertise is limited to SAP BusinessObjects administration, but I’ve realized that my SQL development skills are quite weak. Given your experience, I’d greatly value your guidance on what skills or technologies, I could easily transition into. Do you think there’s a particular area I should focus on that aligns well with SAP BusinessObjects, or any path that would offer good growth opportunities? I truly appreciate any advice you can share. Thanks in advance for your time and insights!
Hey Jude,
Don’t make it bad. Take a sad song and make it better (Sorry, Paul, I couldn’t resist).
Thanks for writing. As you surely know, BusinessObjects is still out there but it is certainly declining not growing. If you look at my profile, you can see that three years ago I attempted to reinvent myself as a ThoughtSpot professional. It was a short opportunity (and many other talented people have been laid off from ThoughtSpot since I left). But that led to a two-year opportunity supporting both BusinessObjects and ThoughtSpot, a job I was perfect for.
The good news for you is that there is so much more free training from vendors or fairly inexpensive training from places like Udemy. But it depends on what you want to do.
Although I think cloud computing will cool off once the big wave of moving from on-premise to cloud is over, becoming an AWS/Azure/GCP administrator might be a good fit, especially if you enjoy the Windows or Linux admin duties that come with being a good BOBJ admin. All three cloud vendors have what I call a “baby” or “first” certification that isn’t too technical but makes sure that you understand the terminology (which varies from vendor to vendor) and can explain it to potential customers. My AWS certification has since expired, but I earned these basic certifications for both AWS and Azure (see related articles, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and Resources for Microsoft Azure AZ-900 Certification).
Do you enjoy working with SQL? Even if you’re weak, I would look into Snowflake or Databricks, who are currently the new cloud heavyweights. My ThoughtSpot experience was 95% on Snowflake. Even in my current role we installed free PostgresSQL to model some 2024 Paris Olympic Games data. So there are lots of inexpensive ways to grow in SQL competency.
I have always felt that ETL development was being a glorified fork-lift driver, just moving data from here to there (apologies to my friends who are ETL developers). So, I’ve never been terribly interested in it. But there are platforms like dbt.
And of course, there is Tableau and Microsoft Power BI, the current leaders in the analytics space. Tableau has their free public edition, which allows you to show the world a Tableau “resume”.
A lot of today’s technology is now glued together with the Python language. You can install Python and Anaconda for free and there’s all kinds of free or inexpensive resources to learn how to program with it. I learned enough to be dangerous, but my current role doesn’t often require me to code anything.
And we haven’t even discussed if your experience with BOBJ is with SAP applications. SAP, S4/HANA, BW/4HANA is its own technology island. 99% of my BOBJ has been non-SAP. Even Apple pumps its SAP data into a Snowflake data warehouse, not HANA or BW/4HANA (cue Apple’s SAP sales exec, crying).
So, a lot of your decision ultimately depends on what you WANT to do more than what you HAVE to do. There is so much technology out there that nobody can master it all.
Lastly, I see that you turned on the #OpenToWork badge on your LinkedIn profile. I recently had to push that button, which led to my new job at Need4Viz. I just want to offer a word of encouragement. If you’re out of work, IT’S NOT YOU. Personally, I’m frustrated that everything that I see around me (inflation, jobs) tells me that the world isn’t doing very well right now. But the media want me to believe everything is fine and that I should vote for a cackling lady that doesn’t seem to know where she has been for the past three-and one-half years. On the positive side, she really has a thing for Venn diagrams. Sorry, didn’t mean to go political…
My point is that you are a human being and as such have value. There are things out in the world that only YOU can do. Have a humble attitude, don’t be afraid to learn something new, and press on!
Good luck and stay in touch. I want to know how the story ends…
Na, na, na, na-na-na-naa… Na-na-na-naa, hey, Jude!
What advice would you give to Jude? Leave your remarks in the comments.
