| Cross Training into SAP & SAP Certification |
| Written by Gary Elliott - 14/06/2010 | |
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My first task will be to develop a plan to become certified in SAP BW. Whilst Certification is no substitute for experience, following a structured learning process provides the advantage of enabling me to understand the reasons and background to how things are done within SAP BW, rather than simply getting by on knowing which checkboxes to tick to fix a problem. I will not go into the specifics of SAP Certification here as this link will provide you with information relating to SAP Certification Level’s and Certification Focus Areas. The certification that I will be initially attempting will be ‘SAP Certified Application Associate – Business Intelligence with SAP NetWeaver 7.0'. The basis of the plan that I will develop will come from the Topic weightings indicated by SAP for the exam found here. I will also be using the following two books to help me get started; SAP BW Certification – A Business Information Warehouse Study Guide (ISBN 0471447145), and Master the SAP Business Information Warehouse (ISBN 0471219711). Both of these books are now somewhat dated and refer to both the 3.0 and 3.5 versions of BW. Utilise all available internal resources I am in the fortunate position of being surrounded by some very talented collegues in my new role at Bluefin Solutions . In additional to some great internal training material to help me get started, I have just completed a 3 day internal training course on the SAP BW Back-End given by one of our Senior Consultants. This option will be different for everybody depending upon their circumstances and the organisation they are in. In whatever organisation you belong to, I would advise that you seek out all resources available to you, such as internal forums, internal libraries, mentoring schemes, etc. In some cases, this may not be option at all for people who are trying to break into the SAP market and have not yet found a position. In such cases, more emphasis should be placed on the other strategies outlined here. Become active in both the SAP SCN Forums During my time at Oracle, the public forums were the go-to place for any issues that you had during an implementation. For every problem that you come up against, the chances are good that somebody else has already experienced this problem and discovered a solution. To gain an understanding of the types of issues and challenges that I can expect to come up against for an SAP BW implementation, I will be reading up on the SAP SCN forums for SAP BW. This link will direct you to the list of BI forums within the SAP forums. Utilise on-line resources to gain further knowledge In addition to the developers handbook , here is a list of sites that have helped me get started with SAP BW.
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