Enterprise Application Skills

Written by Tsvetanka Stoyanova

Enterprise application skills is not new to IT and there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of IT pros, who specialize in this area. For many people enterprise application skills are just one of the many areas they have some basic knowledge of, while for others, enterprise application skills are the core competency and a life-time career.

If you belong to the second group, then there is good news for you – the demand for enterprise application skills is not only steady – it is increasing.

Maybe you are asking yourself: should I get more training in that direction? If you don't have a solid background in enterprise applications, it will require plenty of off the job training. Enterprise application technology is hardly something one can learn overnight and it is an area, like many other IT areas, where beginners are not tolerated. There is a demand for experienced enterprise application experts with years of experience. Quite simply, enterprise applications are not a beginner-friendly area, but the demand is high for them.

There Is No Recession for Enterprise Application Skills?

It might sound strange that the demand for enterprise application skills is increasing now, when IT budgets are shrinking and news of layoffs and bankruptcy are flooding from all directions. During the previous recession, in the beginning of this century, networking skills were in demand (at least according to some major industry analysts), now it is enterprise application skills' turn.

The demand for enterprise application skills goes up and down in drastic shifts of demand. Several years ago IDC reported a decrease in the demand for application enterprise skills, while now, as surprising as is might sound, the wave is going up. The fact of the matter is that demand is now up for these skills and the pool is shallow.

SAP skills have grown between 25% and 30% in value in recent months. Also hot are unified messaging, wireless networking, PHP, XML, Oracle, business intelligence and network security management skills. And over the past year, SANs, VoIP and virtualization posted pay gains.

SAP has so many products that even if somebody decides to spend his or her life studying them all, it is still impossible, so it is useful to know which of them are the leaders. This article, which deals with payment rises for SAP professionals, sheds some light on the topic which areas are the most lucrative.

It is obvious that the differences in payment between different SAP products are drastic - starting from SAP Materials Management with a 57.1 percent increase, to the 25% drop for SAP Payroll – so it is certainly not precise to say that all SAP experts are well paid.

Another major category of enterprise application skills, which still sells is Windows enterprise application skills. This is also hardly surprising – Windows is the dominating operating system in enterprises and companies need people to maintain it.

There is a clear demand for professionals in the enterprise application arena. The demand will continue to increase as other technologies such as cloud computing become widely used as many predict.