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It's the end of Quarter 3 and we hope you, your family and colleagues are safe and well during this trying time. Here at Speller we have continued ‘business as usual’ and yet Covid-19 did affect our Quarter. Jack Bland explains exactly how it affected Speller.

So, what skill did we place most of during this time? What skill are still highly sort after? Is the SAP market suffering… or not?

It’s time to find out.

For your own comparison here is my Q2 (FY19/20) Quarterly crunch and here is Q3 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 and ask and/or to share your own thoughts.

We had a great start to the year, smashing our January monthly target with 127% of target and feeling like we’d made a huge improvement on how 2019 finished up. However, the quarter wasn’t to be as successful as last year (in Q3 last year we achieved 138% target) with the outbreak of COVID-19 really hitting many of the SAP industries hard.

Considering how the quarter finished we achieved a respectful 85% of target…

In regards to purely sales (sales = people placed within the SAP field in either contract or permanent engagements), Speller International achieved 85% of quarter sales target. We placed 62% more people in Quarter 3 this year (Jan/Feb/Mar 20) than we did in the previous Quarter 2 (Oct/Nov/Dec 2019). By comparison, it was 41% fewer than the same Quarter the previous year (Jan/Feb/Mar 2019)

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

•Tester
•Program/Project Managers
•ABAP
•FICO
•BA

FYI Last quarter (Q2 FY19/20) … It was;

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

What % were permanent vs Contract in Quarter 3?

25% of the people we placed last Quarter were permanent (or fixed term) and 75% contract. Note; 7.7% 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 102 vacant SAP job positions to fill throughout the Quarter, compared to the previous Quarter which was 121 vacancies (and 103 in Q1). 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 Requirement

•Testers
•Trainers
•SuccessFactors
•Project/Program Managers
•Architects
•BA
•Change
•SuccessFactors (BA, Admin, Tester, Training)

FYI – the top 5 requirements from Q2 were;

•ABAP
•HCM (SF, PY, HR)
•CRM
•Project, practice managers
•Trainer

Most difficult skill set to find for Quarter 3?

SAP SuccessFactors and Payroll are still busy areas with a number of inflight projects for Q3. We also saw some demand for Ariba and found this skill set low in supply in the Australian market.

New Roles/Skills Emerging

We have noticed Fieldglass seems to be getting traction in the market and there are a few implementations planned for the rest of the year.

Average Contract Length

Last Quarter we averaged an initial contract length of 17.57 weeks (this does not take into account extensions), Q2 was 13.40 weeks, Q1 was 21.52 weeks, Q2 was 15.75 weeks and in Q2 it was 18.81 weeks.

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

If you want to know more about Speller International and the Speller Team, feel free to follow us on LinkedIn.