The job I just left in April used SAP. SAP is a super confusing ERP system that the Germans invented because they hate American manufacturing. I can only assume that part is true based on what a joke of a system it is. It is not user friendly, and is easily the worst ERP system I’ve ever used. If you note that you’re an SAP user on your resume, you’ll probably get a few calls the next day.
My last job offered absolutely no SAP training. A gal who had just graduated from ASU three months prior showed me about three different transactions. If one played around in SAP for an entire work year, he/she would never figure it out without help. It’s the opposite of any Microsoft application that most folks born after 1975 could figure out after a few hours. I know that’s apples and oranges, but I’m trying to state that I bet it’s possible to create a user-friendly system.
I sat in my lone cubicle and was ignored for a solid three weeks. My “manager” was never around. I’d go by his desk multiple times a day for help, and he was never there. One day, I went by his desk 10 times before I gave up trying to find him. Most companies introduce you to people and take you on a small tour when you start. This company did none of that. Anyone who could help me was too busy. The place was a disaster, and I felt as if I was always in the dark about how to do my job. After 10 months, they did some training on all of the metrics we had to report, but there was never one second of SAP training. When I bitched, my manager said “You have a friend on the planning team. You could’ve gotten her to help train you.” Yeah, she’d much rather stay late to train someone on another team than to go home and see her kids.
My current job hired me because I’d been using SAP for a year. That made me nervous. I thought they’d be horribly disappointed in how little I knew. Many companies hire people who already know SAP mostly because they don’t want to train you to use it. But then something miraculous happened: My new employer sent me to an SAP class. A class! For five straight days!
I learned more in the first 6 hours of that class than I learned in a year of being ignored at my last job. That is no exaggeration. The amount I learned in 6 hours would’ve have been crazy-valuable at my last job. So I wonder this: Why couldn’t my last job give us at least half a day of SAP training? We all had laptops, so it’s not like we needed a classroom. Just a room and six hours of someone’s time. Instead they did no SAP training, and we had a “leadership” team that was completely unavailable to us. I can’t put into words how unavailable they were other than to say that it took me four hours to find a manager to give my letter of resignation to on the day I quit.
And this leads nicely into a post about how the various things I hate about companies have evolved over the years.
-
chicksarestupid likes this
-
theunemployedmba posted this
