IgniteSAP spends a lot of time helping our clients source and attract the best talent, but the other side of that coin is how to retain that valuable workforce.

Avoiding a regular search for consultants with the right skills and capabilities by keeping a pool of the best consultants in the firm saves money and makes it more likely that consultancies are able to put together the right team at the right time for specific projects for SAP consultancies’ customers. 

This is essential during the current wave of migrations, which are causing a spike in demand for the best consultants, meaning competition for them is extremely high.

DSAG’s 2026 Investment Report found that only thirty-seven percent of its member companies still plan to be off SAP ECC by the end of 2027, with roughly half now pushing that date out to 2030, and a further four percent willing to pay for extended maintenance to 2033. Skills shortages and stretched budgets are what the report blames for the slippage.

That changes every staffing decision a German, Austrian, or Swiss consultancy makes this year. A consultant asking for S/4HANA Cloud or BTP exposure (in response to changes in the skills required for SAP consulting projects) is asking for something a real share of the market can’t supply yet, not on the timeline they want. 

Consultants need to build skills for the next wave of consulting, while firms are focused on delivering for the current wave. 

Also, the EU Pay Transparency Directive‘s deadline for national implementation passed on the seventh of June, and Germany missed it, along with most of the rest of the bloc. The law itself is not expected before early 2027, and the individual rights it grants, including the ability to request average pay data for a comparable role, are not due to take effect until around 2028. Once the underlying law is transposed, expected in early 2027, it will also change what a consultancy has to disclose to a candidate before interview, not only what a current employee can request. 

Consultancies need to explain the decisions they make that affect a consultant’s career progression. A consultancy can still lose its best people while paying market rate and offering a recognizable name on a CV, when a decision got made about someone’s career and the reasoning behind it never reached them.

The Reasons Everyone Already Names

Ask any consultancy why people leave and the same list comes back: pay that lags a competitor’s offer, benefits that don’t match a rival’s package, travel and workload that wear down a personal life over time, and a general sense that promotion takes too long. Gallup’s breakdown of what leavers cite puts compensation and benefits at the top, with manager relationships, career advancement, and workload close behind. None of that is wrong, and none of it is news.

A consultancy that gets pay, benefits, and workload right still loses consultants worth keeping, because those four factors describe what people notice, not when a firm actually tells them what it decided about their career, which is where the real damage happens.

The Unspoken Contract

Every pattern that follows shares a characteristic: a firm makes a decision in its own short-term interest, and the consultant it affects learns the reasoning behind it only after acting on it no longer helps them.

Organizational psychologists call the feeling that follows a late explanation a “violated psychological contract”: the sense of a promise broken, which is harder to recover from than a straightforward disappointment.

Employees who can see how a decision got made stay measurably longer than employees who only ever see its outcome.

Four moments recur across SAP delivery, and each one is a story about timing: when the consultant found out, not what they were eventually told.

The Deployment That Ignored What They Asked For

Picture a consultant who has said, clearly and more than once, that they want exposure to S/4HANA Cloud or BTP work. The next rotation puts them back on the same on-premise account instead, with no explanation offered at any point in the process.

Given the points above, that reassignment might be the only sound business call available. A thin bench, a client account the firm has no wish to destabilize, and utilization targets that punish idle time all argue for keeping a proven consultant in place. The actual failure is that no one took the time to explain that trade-off, even though the logic behind it is sound.

Two consecutive rotations against a stated preference, with no reason given either time, is a reasonable point for a consultant to treat as a sign to consider other options.

If a manager has already acknowledged what a consultant wants and then does not carry that forward, they owe that consultant an answer: including what changed, or what criteria were not met. A practice that keeps a written record of stated preferences, checked against staffing decisions before they’re finalized, gives that same manager an easier way to answer.

The Development Spend That Never Reached the Work

Development suffers from a specific kind of self-deception: a firm can spend real money on it and still get no retention benefit at all.

A paid-for certification that never gets applied to live engagement work does nothing for the consultant who holds it, or for the consultancy that provided the funds. Research on psychological empowerment finds that a strong learning culture affects how long someone stays only through the sense of fit and connection it builds, not through the training spend itself.

The most common version of this shows up as a consultant kept in a shadow or support role well past the point they were ready to own a workstream, or stand in front of a steering committee.

A Prosple survey of Big Four junior consultants found two people at the same firm and the same level, on two projects running at the same time, with wildly different experiences: one running client workshops, the other answering emails. That gap is a staffing-lottery outcome, not a deliberate policy, and it only closes when a firm intervenes to make it otherwise.

Twelve months at a role or engagement type is a defensible point to review scope and skill exposure. A consultant who names, specifically, which piece of engagement work a new certification or skill should get applied to before that review arrives gives a manager something concrete to act on. A manager who runs that scope review at month twelve regardless of whether the consultant raises it first is addressing a problem before it develops.

The Promotion That Waited for a Resignation Letter

A business case for promotion can be fundable and deserved for months, and only happen once a consultant has already handed in notice.

Gallup’s workplace research on preventable turnover found that most voluntary leavers had no substantive conversation about their future in their final three months, and that the active search window, once open, tends to close within weeks. By the time a firm reacts to a resignation, that reaction happens too late to read as good faith.

A case that comes together in April has nowhere to go until the cycle opens in November, so the firm’s own calendar turns an honest “not yet” into silence.

A manager who defines the actual blocker and a date to revisit it, such as “the case needs a second flagship client reference by the summer review, and we’ll look at it again in June,” gives a consultant an action to take and a point of reference.

A firm that reviews cases against a tenure or skill-milestone trigger, rather than only on request or on resignation, never looks like it only decides under pressure.

The Pay Review That Waited for Them to Ask

A specialist SAP recruiter’s own 2026 benchmarking and a general job-board salary aggregator, covering the same seniority band among German SAP consultants, disagree by a wide enough margin that citing either alone invites easy criticism.

That disagreement is itself the useful data: a market moving fast enough to produce two credible, contradictory numbers for the same role is a market no fixed internal pay band can track by sitting still.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive gives this a real but distant deadline. Compensation review isn’t compulsory yet, and won’t be for a year or two. A firm that starts benchmarking now, while that’s still true, gets to look proactive rather than compliant once the deadline eventually lands.

A consultant almost always finds out their own pay has drifted below market from a peer or a recruiter call before the firm’s own systems register it.

Quarterly benchmarking against current market data for scarce skills, reviewed on the same calendar as utilization reporting rather than folded into one annual increase round, catches drift long before a consultant has to raise it. A consultant who checks their own banding against current market data before a conversation, rather than during one, walks in already knowing whether the number on offer is a correction or a placeholder.

Each of the four scenarios above is the same failure: a decision made for sound short-term reasons, disclosed only once the reasoning stopped being useful to the person it affected. Fixing the timing on any one of them raises the odds of keeping the consultant it concerns, though it doesn’t guarantee the outcome against a genuinely better outside offer, or a personal reason to leave that has nothing to do with the firm at all.

Why This Is a Pipeline Problem

The consultants a firm loses to these four patterns are disproportionately its most embedded, client-trusted, senior-track people, not a random cross-section of the wider team. Losing them costs more than the search and onboarding of a replacement. It costs the firm by diminishing its own pool of potential future practice leads: those who can take years of experience with the firm and use that knowledge, along with their other consulting experience to practice the kind of leadership that consultancies require.

Rate is expensive and slow to move as a way of winning this talent back. Disclosing reasoning earlier and more consistently costs nothing and can start this quarter.

Each of the four mechanisms above works better with a named owner and a fixed date on a calendar than as a general aspiration.

A practice lead who reviews staffing-preference overrides at every rotation catches the first pattern before it repeats. A home-practice manager who owns the twelve-month scope review catches the second. Promotion cases reviewed against tenure and skill milestones, on the practice lead’s own calendar rather than only inside the annual cycle, catch the third. Compensation benchmarking on that same quarterly calendar as utilization reporting catches the fourth.

What to Do About It This Week

If you’re the consultant reading this against your own last twelve months, one exercise is enough for now: name which of these four moments you’re currently inside, and ask the specific question that section named, this week rather than at the next scheduled review.

If you’re the one running the practice, pick one of the four cadences above and put it on next quarter’s calendar. Not all four at once: one, done properly, teaches the rest of the practice what to expect from the other three.

The firms that keep their best consultants make their hard decisions out loud, not quietly and not held back until someone forces the issue.

IgniteSAP works with SAP consultancies on exactly this kind of resourcing problem, helping practices build the permanent bench and contractor pipeline a plan like this depends on. If that support would help your own workforce planning, get in touch with us on LinkedIn.