Quarterly Crunch – Q2 FY19/20

With the summer holidays coming to an end and Judy on Maternity leave, Jack Bland has taken the reigns to review our last quarter. Let’s see what the numbers say!

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 Judy’s Q1 (FY19/20) Quarterly crunch and here is Q2 for last year (financial year 18/19) just for fun! You can see all of our Quarterly Crunches on our blog if 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 on our LinkedIn page and/or to share your own thoughts.

Unfortunately, the slow start to the financial year has continued. We had a terrible finish to the year (October was good but November and December were really poor results) so we’re still chasing our tails to make up for the sluggish start to the year. We only achieved 52% of our quarter sales target.

In regards to purely sales (sales = people placed within the SAP field in either contract or permanent engagements), Speller International only achieved 52% of quarter sales target.

We placed 25% less people in Quarter 2 this year (Oct/Nov/Dec 2019) than we did in the previous Quarter 1 (Jul, Aug, Sept 2019). By comparison, it was 6% more than the same Quarter the previous year (Oct/Nov/Dec 2018).

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

•HCM (SF, PY, HR)
•ABAP
•Trainer
•BA
•APO

FYI Last quarter (Q1 FY19/20) … It was;

•SAP Developers (ABAP/Fiori/UI5)
•SAP Program/Project Manager
•SAP BASIS (inc. Hana)
•SAP Business Analysts
•SAP Trainers (inc. Instructional Design)

What % were permanent vs Contract in Quarter 2?

7.7% of the people we placed last Quarter were permanent (or fixed term) and 92.3% contract. Note; 15.2% of the people we placed in the previous Quarter (Q1) 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 the best indication 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 of 121 vacant SAP job positions to fill throughout the Quarter, compared to the previous Quarter which was 103 vacancies (and 161 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.

Top Requirements

•ABAP
•HCM (SF, PY, HR)
•CRM
•Project, practice managers
•Trainer
•FICO
•Change
•BA
•Architect (EAM, Int, Tech, Sol)
•Tester

FYI - the top 5 requirements from Q4 were:

•SAP HCM (SF, PY, HR)
•SAP Business Analyst
•SAP Program/Project Manager
•SAP Change Management
•SAP SD Consultant

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

Hana Modellers have been in high demand as well as solution architects with S/4 experience. So that was our Quarter 2; our top placed SAP areas, SAP skills most required and permanent vs contract data – all without any conclusion from us!

New Roles/ Skills Emerging

These are not new skills per say but we have seen a rise in demand for hana modelers and integration consultants with CPI.

Average Contract Length

Last Quarter we averaged an initial contract length of 13.40 weeks (this does not take into account extensions), Q1 was 21.52 weeks, Q4 was 15.75 weeks, Q3 was 18.81 weeks and in Q2 it was 7 weeks.

Blog