What should the SAP ABAP consultant learn to upgrade himself?

There’s too many things to learn to upgrade himself. For one, there are new SAP technologies popping up every year. Fiori, UI5, Odata, BRF+, Leonardo, etc

But, what I would recommend is learn the functional side. I have often meet SAP developers that know nothing about the business functionality. Sure, they can implement a correction given a certain parameter or do complex development based on the specifications from business or other other consultants. But, it always surprised me that there’s too many ABAP developers that don’t know how stuff works in SAP.

The progression of SAP developers is:

• Learn how to code in ABAP
• Can code in ABAP specifications from other senior ABAP developers
• Can write ABAP specifications based on the problem/functionality
• Can write framework specification that are reusable and applicable to common problem/functionalities
• Can tell the customer that, while you can do it in ABAP, here’s how you do it in SAP standard.

I have seen too many broken SAP systems because they try to solve everything via ABAP programs. The real objective in a SAP implementation is to streamline your business. It’s not an automation tool or a IT system. It is a business platform. With any SAP implementation comes business transformation. If there’s something an ABAP should learn to become a true consultant, he should learn how to transform the business and transform SAP to fit business needs.

ABAP has been (and still is) the De Facto language for SAP products. There will always be systems that need abap knowledge to maintain. However, SAP is, like all big software companies, moving towards a more SaaS and PaaS approach with SAP Cloud Platform.

A subset of ABAP, optimized for the cloud, is supported by SAP Cloud Platform, which means that your ABAP skills can still be used. The only question is if the industry will still be using ABAP (or a subset of it) for development when languages with a bigger user base (and also better designed), such as Java are also available.

I think your best bet would be to familiarize yourself with SAP Cloud Platform and then see if ABAP still makes sense.

As others also mentioned, Fiori is the new UI framework for all SAP products and it is javascript based, so javascript knowledge would also be beneficial.

Last but not least, as an SAP consultant, you should also learn as much as you can about your functional topics (FI/CO, Logistics, etc). More important than the technology, is what you build with it, and you should have a good understanding of what kind of problems you are trying to solve.

Industry and IT are evolving with tremendous pace and although the requirement for SAP ABAP is going to be there for foreseeable period, the requirement for SAP ABAP is going to diminish.

The reason is simply because there will be way too many people in the market who knows SAP ABAP + something else (for ex, UI, PI, BI, AI ..etc). Some of these people just know very basic ABAP and are good for nothing when it comes to consulting but who will ever know. The HR managers and Recruiting managers also need to manage their cost and they are ready to suffer a little on ABAP but want to gain on the new technologies. So, your ABAP knowledge may be better than them and they still may need ABAPers for their work, they will still hire someone who can provide more. So look for something which interests you and I am giving some items which you can study.

Please note this list is neither sufficient not comprehensive. Find a mentor and discuss more.

Now the list.

• SAP Fiori (UX)
• avaScripts (useful for UI5, Personas)
• EWM
• Success Factor
• Cloud Integration
• Analytics
• BI, BO
• SAP Lumira

Start looking at personas ,fiori ,cds,new SQL /ABAP syntax ,hana axs and amdps . The open sap courses are easy way to start upgrading your skill set