Every SAP consultant working today was trained at someone’s expense, and who paid has more influence on a career than it usually gets credit for.

This year’s data shows how much pressure there is to train more people. The DSAG Investment Report 2026, published in February, found that 54% of the member companies surveyed still run ECC or an older Business Suite release. DSAG chairman Jens Hungershausen cited skills shortages among the reasons ECC migrations are being pushed back. Across IT more broadly, Bitkom’s 2026 study of German companies reports that the vacancy gap has nearly halved since 2023, yet 78% of the firms surveyed still report a shortage of IT specialists.

So the market needs new SAP consultants, and someone has to fund their training: SAP, a consultancy, a client, the state, or the consultant personally. In our experience, each funding model tends to produce a slightly different kind of consultant. All of them depend on the people reading this, because every model relies on experienced consultants to teach and supervise.

Knowledge Is Cheap; Project Experience Is Expensive

Turning a graduate into a billable SAP consultant involves several costs at once. An employed trainee usually draws a salary through a period of little or no billable work. Senior consultants spend hours teaching that they could have spent delivering, and there is system access and certification on top. Then there is the slow climb towards full utilisation, which can take longer than any formal training period. Consultancies rarely publish per-head training costs, so any precise number quoted for the cost of training a consultant deserves some scepticism.

What has changed is the price of knowledge itself. SAP offers free learning journeys on learning.sap.com to help people prepare for certification, while SAP Learning Hub is a paid subscription. Much of the course content consultants need is now freely available. Supervised time on a live system, with an experienced colleague checking the work, remains the costly part, and every training model has to fund it somehow.

Why SAP Pays for Some of It

SAP funds its own pipeline at two very different scales. Its dual study programme in Wirtschaftsinformatik, which at its Walldorf location runs with the Duale Hochschule Mannheim, pays students throughout a three-year degree and opens a route into SAP itself. The SAP Young Professionals Program, which SAP describes as “a free initiative” and runs in selected markets, is a short course preparing recent graduates for associate consultant roles. SAP says it then introduces graduates to opportunities with customers and partners, although it states that a job is not guaranteed.

There is a commercial logic to paying for training that may end up working for other firms. Our reading is that SAP’s cloud growth depends partly on partners having enough people to deliver RISE and GROW projects, so every consultant SAP helps to train is also delivery capacity for SAP’s own revenue.

The SAP Academy Template Has Lasted Two Decades

Consultancies have run their own SAP academies for a long time. In 2005, Computerwoche reported on an Accenture trainee programme for graduates across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It combined five weeks of classroom training with SAP trainers and five months of practical project work. A similar sequence of classroom training followed by early project work appears in consultancy graduate programmes advertised today, even though the product set has changed a great deal since then.

Germany adds a variant of its own, with dual study and dual master’s programmes in SAP consulting advertised openly. Employers typically pay a salary and often cover tuition, and some ask for a commitment to stay for a period after graduating.

These programmes fit the economics of the consulting pyramid. Juniors billed under senior supervision gradually earn back what their training cost. The arithmetic works best when utilisation stays high and few people leave in the first couple of years.

Reports during 2025 described some large professional services firms reducing graduate intake. PwC’s UK chief, Marco Amitrano, linked his firm’s lower entry-level numbers in 2025 to the wider slowdown in investment and hiring, while acknowledging that AI is reshaping roles. It is one example from one market, although the pressures he named also bear on how SAP practices budget for juniors.

Training Repayment Clauses Give Employers Thin Protection

Employers who fund expensive training often try to protect the investment with a repayment clause, and German courts scrutinise those clauses closely. In October 2025, in a case involving a care worker, the Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht, case 9 AZR 266/24) struck out a training repayment clause because its wording left it unclear which resignations would trigger repayment. Under German standard-terms law the invalid clause fell away entirely, so the employer recovered nothing.

The tests courts apply cover transparency about the costs, a genuine benefit to the employee, a proportionate binding period, and fairness about which resignations trigger repayment. Austria writes its rules into statute, in §2d of the AVRAG, and Switzerland relies on contract law and case law, so the detail differs depending on where you work.

In practice, a repayment clause gives employers limited protection. In our experience, employers who retain people well do it through pay, progression and the quality of the project work they offer.

For consultants, this has two practical consequences. Read any repayment terms closely before accepting employer-funded certification, and if a move looks likely, take employment-law advice on the exact wording. If you change jobs with an obligation still outstanding, raise it early with the prospective employer. It can become part of the offer negotiation, and it is much simpler to settle before the contract stage than after it.

Who Keeps the Return on Training

Economists worked through this problem decades ago. Gary Becker separated general training, which makes an employee more valuable to any employer, from firm-specific training, which mainly benefits the current one. Most SAP skills lean towards the general category, because a consultant who can run a finance workstream is useful to many partners and clients. Becker’s theory predicts that, in a competitive labour market, employers will be reluctant to fund general training and trainees will bear its cost, typically through lower pay while they train.

The evidence is less tidy than the theory. Bastian Stockinger and Thomas Zwick, in a 2017 ZEW discussion paper, studied German apprenticeships and found that firms which lost trained apprentices to competitors did not cut their training afterwards. Apprenticeships differ from consultancy academies in many ways, so the finding is best read as a caution against assuming poaching risk alone decides how much an employer trains.

In our work we see employers that mainly train, employers that mainly hire people trained elsewhere, and many that do both. Consultants, as we see it, become most mobile once they have a few years of delivery behind them. Some firms that invest heavily in training build more of what they teach around their own delivery methods, accelerators and internal tools. That is worth bearing in mind before you assume every skill on your CV will keep its full value at the next employer.

Where You Trained Matters Less Each Year

Comparisons between training routes rest on observation, since we have found no published data tracking outcomes by route. From placing consultants, we see that each route leaves a recognisable starting profile. Academy entrants often arrive with a delivery method and early exposure to clients. Key users who move across into consulting bring a depth of process knowledge that graduates can take years to build.

The hiring managers we work with regularly ask for evidence of the full project lifecycle, whatever route a candidate took. By mid-career, in our experience, a consultant’s delivery record counts for more than their starting profile.

That shapes how you should present your training. A certification or course linked to something you then built, migrated or fixed tends to carry more weight with those hiring managers than the same credential listed on its own.

AI Is Absorbing the Work Juniors Learned From

In Bitkom’s 2026 study, 55% of the German companies surveyed said they expect AI to reduce classic entry-level tasks in IT. In SAP consulting those tasks did a particular job. Testing, documentation, data mapping and basic configuration are where juniors learned how a system behaves under real conditions, and they are also the kind of structured, repeatable work that AI tools are designed to assist with.

If consultancies take on fewer juniors while migration demand stays high, fewer people will reach mid-level in the years that follow, and that is the layer experienced consultants depend on to staff their projects. Interest in newer areas shows in the DSAG report too: 16% of respondents rated their planned investment in BTP for AI use cases as high or medium. That gives new entrants good reason to look for training that covers BTP, data and AI.

Funding Routes for SAP Training Open to Employed Consultants

Several public routes exist alongside employer budgets. Most German federal states give employees a statutory right to educational leave, known as Bildungsurlaub or Bildungszeit, which can cover approved vocational courses. Under §82 SGB III, the Federal Employment Agency can also co-fund approved longer courses for people in work. Funding is at the agency’s discretion, and the share expected from the employer depends on company size.

Where a works council exists, §§96 to 98 of the Works Constitution Act give it rights over workplace training, including a say in how training measures are carried out. That makes it a useful place to raise training needs that management has left unanswered.

In Austria, Weiterbildungszeit replaced Bildungskarenz in 2026. It needs a voluntary written agreement with the employer, and the AMS subsidy depends on the budget available. Job-related training you pay for yourself may also be tax-deductible, so check with a tax adviser before booking a course.

These routes mostly suit formal, approved courses. The steady, small-scale learning that keeps an SAP consultant current still depends largely on employer budgets and your own time.

What Experienced SAP Consultants Should Ask For

Many senior consultants mentor juniors as part of their everyday work. Some firms count it formally in promotion decisions and others have yet to do so. Either way, a documented record of developing other people gives hiring managers evidence of a skill that is hard to test at interview, and it can strengthen the case for a manager or principal role.

Certification has also turned into a recurring cost. SAP certifications now need a stay-certified assessment every twelve months, and the assessment is accessed through a paid SAP Learning Hub subscription. If a certification lapses, you have to sit the full exam for the current release, so it is worth settling explicitly who pays for the subscription.

When you assess a prospective employer, a handful of questions show how seriously it takes training.

Is there an annual training budget per consultant, and who decides how it is spent?

Is learning time protected from billable targets, or is it expected in evenings and at weekends?

Does the firm pay for certification and its yearly renewal?

What repayment terms come with funded training?

How does the firm give experienced consultants access to BTP, AI and other newer areas of work?

How much an employer invests in juniors is a signal as well. In our view, a firm that is building its own bench is more likely to spread routine delivery work across a team and leave room for its senior people to move up. If you are an SAP professional looking for a new role in the SAP ecosystem, our team of dedicated recruitment consultants can match you with the right role and support you at every stage. Join your community at IgniteSAP.