Quarterly Crunch Q4 18/19

Posted on August 2019 By Judy Cole
Quarterly Crunch

​And just like that another year done. It’s time again for my Quarterly Crunch where we look at how the SAP market/Speller has performed over this last quarter (Q4) 18/19 financial year.

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 myQ3 (FY18/19) Quarterly crunchand here is Q4 for last year (financial year 17/18) just for fun!

You can see all of our Quarterly Crunches on ourblogif you wish to look at even more stats… exciting!

To recap, we give you Speller’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 and ask and/or to share your own thoughts.

So, let’s see how we went…

We Smashed our target again this quarter – making up for our poor first 6 months of the year. Reaching 130% of our quarter target!  For those who read these regularly you may remember that we missed both our Q1 and Q2 targets thus it was a slow start to the year. These past 2 quarters made up for our first 2 and we ended the year on 110% of target!

In regards to purely sales (sales = people placed within the SAP field in either contract or permanent engagements), Speller International placed 1.8% less people in Quarter 4 this year (April/May/June 2019) than we did in the previous Quarter 3 (Jan/Feb/March 2019). By comparison, it was24% morethan the same Quarter the previous year (April/May/June 2018).

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

  • SAP Training & Documentation

  • SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

  • SAP Finance (FICO & S/4)

  • SAP Data (conversion, analyst & master data)

  • SAP HCM (SF,HR, PY)

FYI Last quarter (Q3 FY18/19) … It was;

  • SAP Business Analyst

  • SAP Testers

  • SAP Payroll Consultants

  • SAP Data (conversion, analyst & master data)

  • SAP Change Management

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What % were permanent vs Contract in Quarter 4?
12.7% of the people we placed last Quarter were permanent (or fixed term) and 87.3% contract. Note; 7.2% of the people we placed in the previous Quarter (Q3) 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 thebestindication 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 of161 vacantSAP job positions to fill throughout the Quarter, compared to the previous Quarter which was 153 vacancies (and 105 in Q4 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, 11% were permanent or fixed term engagements and 89% were contract requirements.

Top Requirements

  • SAP HCM (SF, PY, HR)

  • SAP Training & Documentation

  • SAP Business Analyst

  • SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)

  • SAP Finance (FICO & S/4)

  • SAP CRM/C4C Developers

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

  • SAP Tester

  • SAP Change Management

  • SAP Project Management

FYI – the top 5 requirements from Q3 were;

  • SAP Business Analyst

  • SAP SuccessFactors

  • SAP Payroll Consultant (on-prem)

  • SAP Training

  • SAP Testing

Most difficult skill set to find for Quarter 2 (in no particular order)

  • SAP SuccessFactors (across any role – Functional, BA, Tester, Data, Project Management and Training)

  • SAP Fieldglass

  • SAP EnableNow

So that was our Quarter 4; our top placed SAP areas, SAP skills most required and permanent vs contract data – all without any conclusion from us!

New Roles/Skills Emerging
This is not an emerging or a new skill but SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Payroll Consultants have been in extremely high demand and will continue to be this quarter. We are also seeing an increase in Data Architecture and Data Lake requirements.

Average Contract Length
Last Quarter we the averaged an initial contract length was 15.72 weeks (this does not take into account extensions), Q3 18.81, Q2 was 17 weeks and in Q1 it was 19.5 weeks.

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