SAP removes university requirements: Max Wessel, chief learning officer, SAP

As the talent landscape evolves, traditional education such as university degrees are losing relevance according to Max Wessel, chief learning officer at SAP.

Max Wessel, chief learning officer at SAP

Wessel spoke to media during SAP’s Business Innovation Days in San Francisco this week about the organisation’s digital skills initiative, in partnership with Coursera.

According to Wessel, “I can say within the SAP learning organisation, we're removing things like university requirements.

“As we have SAP and partners posting roles, we are now starting to call up the certifications that are relevant. When Adventus will post for its recruitment it will say these are the relevant certifications that we are looking for as a substitute, potentially for a university degree.”

SAP announced its commitment to upskill 2 million developers by 2025 at the TechEd conference this week, through entry level certifications with Coursera.

According to Rich Jacquet, chief people officer at Coursera, “[Coursera] allows people with no educational experience at all, no background in IT, to take up to seven different courses over a five to six month period. To get the necessary certificates to qualify for an entry-level job. You don't have to take entry-level tests, you don't have to have been in education, and you don't have to have been with a consulting firm.

“When I was going through school, you had a hard time picturing what you were going to be doing but these certificates are really clear of ‘This is what I can be and I can be there in five or six months’.”

Wessel believes that the workforce’s move away from university degrees to short courses reflects the rapidly changing tech landscape, where skills and capabilities can quickly become obsolete.

“We are immediately getting to this point where the university degree and relevant skills that you have start to expire much more rapidly. It's a great signal of commitment to learning and these types of things, but it's not the only thing. Increasingly, these types of certifications will play that role of helping with freshness and base level understanding of the problems,” Wessel said. 

“The importance of the IT degree in terms of rendering skills goes down, and that means the programs that we'll see very strong are the ones that are teaching people how to think and how to learn, and how to see the broader system by which application and software resides.”

SAP has also announced that it will sponsor 10,000 free SAP certification courses globally for underrepresented communities in the tech industry including women and minority groups.

“STEM jobs have historically been inaccessible to all sorts of members of the world's workforce, women in particular, underrepresented minorities, and that is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Wessel.

“It also takes an extremely long time to try top-of-funnel improvement in K through 12 education to start fixing that if don't do things differently in terms of how we introduce and involve folks into the technology workforce. So, a lot of the innovation we're driving at SAP Learning is about increasing access to this funnel.”

Velvet-Belle Templeman travelled to San Francisco for SAP's Business Innovation Days, as a guest of SAP.