Open a careers page for almost any SAP consultancy right now and you’ll find a growth number they’re proud to show off. There’s a good reason candidates pay attention to it. A consultancy that’s expanding usually needs more senior people, which means faster routes to promotion for anyone already inside.

It usually means new clients and new types of work, which means broader technical exposure instead of the same project on repeat. And a firm winning enough business to keep growing looks, on the face of it, like a firm with the money to keep investing in the people doing that work: more training, more certification support, more of what makes a job worth staying in.

That’s the logic behind checking a firm’s growth rate before joining it, and it’s not unreasonable.

The trouble is that none of those three benefits, more promotion, more variety, more investment, follow automatically from a growth number. A firm can grow fast without any of them, and a firm can grow slowly while delivering all three.

This article is about telling the two apart, and how to get the related information that will affect your own career growth.

A Different Question From the Ones You’re Used To

Most consultants already have a checklist for judging a consultancy before joining: the range of clients on its books, how much genuine technical exposure a role offers beyond one module, or how quickly people actually get promoted, how much the firm spends on certification and training, and what its reputation is like among people who’ve actually worked there. That checklist doesn’t usually include growth rate, and for good reason: growth rate measures something different.

A training budget, a promotion structure, and a client roster are all set by decisions a firm makes about how to spend its money and organize its people. Growth is simply the outcome of winning more business, and winning more business doesn’t automatically change any of those decisions.

A firm can double its client list and keep training spend exactly where it was, spread over twice as many people now. It can add senior titles to keep pace with client demand without those titles carrying real authority or mentoring capacity behind them.

Growth and the things you’re actually trying to measure can move together, and often they do, but they aren’t the same thing, and a headline growth number won’t tell you which situation you’re looking at.

What the Percentage Doesn’t Ask

Anyone buying a company insists on going through its numbers before trusting the seller’s version of them. An accountant strips out the one-off contract, the favorable currency swing, the deal with a related party, and reports what’s left once the noise clears. It’s called a quality-of-earnings review, and a consultancy’s growth claim deserves the same treatment before a candidate takes it at face value.

A single growth percentage hides at least three separate stories.

Some of it came from winning new client work; some of it might simply be another firm’s revenue and headcount, bought rather than built. Headcount and revenue don’t always move together, either: headcount growing faster than revenue can mean a firm is hiring ahead of demand for good reason, or it can mean output per person is falling, while revenue growing faster than headcount can mean real efficiency, or it can mean the existing team is carrying more for the same money.

Growth also needs to fit inside what a firm can actually afford to fund and staff without straining, a question finance people already have a name for, a sustainable growth rate, which is the fastest a business can expand using its own profits before it needs outside money to keep going.

A firm can be growing quickly and still sit comfortably inside that limit. Plenty aren’t. Aventis Advisors, which tracks mergers and acquisitions across the SAP services sector, counted more than 350 such deals in the decade to 2025, concentrated heavily in continental Europe and driven mainly by a shortage of certified S/4HANA consultants. Buyers are purchasing capacity they can’t build fast enough on their own. A meaningful share of any large or fast-moving firm’s growth number, in a market that active, is bought rather than earned.

Comparing Historical Booms in the Hiring Market

Here’s a real, well-documented example. Through 2022, several of the world’s largest professional-services networks, with sizable SAP practices sitting inside much bigger businesses, hired aggressively. They were working from staff-turnover assumptions that had held for years: something between one consultant in five and one in four leaving voluntarily every year, a rate that justified heavy, constant recruitment just to stand still. Anyone reading the hiring numbers alone in 2022 would have called it a booming, candidate-friendly market.

The following year told a different story. According to Consultancy.uk’s reporting on the period, voluntary turnover across those same firms fell to as low as three percent once the wider job market cooled and people stopped leaving on their own, which left all that 2022 hiring surplus to requirements.

UK vacancy postings across the major consulting networks dropped by roughly sixty percent year on year by 2023, and postings from other large strategy and technology consulting firms fell from close to 1,400 to under 250 over the same period. Several rounds of role cuts followed at more than one firm that had been hiring hardest only months earlier. Anyone who accepted an offer in 2022 on the strength of the hiring numbers alone found themselves inside a very different firm within twelve months of starting.

Neither the 2022 surge nor the 2023 correction changed the growth figures a candidate would ordinarily have checked at the time. Both were visible only to someone asking what was actually behind the number.

Why the Correction Doesn’t Always Look Like Redundancies

Employment protections vary enormously by country, and that changes what a correction looks like. In some places a firm can reduce headcount quickly once it decides to. In others, dismissal law requires a documented business reason, a formal process for choosing who goes, and, above a certain size, a negotiated agreement with employee representatives before any large reduction can go ahead.

Slower processes like these still let a firm correct for growth it can’t sustain; they just change the method of the correction. A candidate who only checks how easily a firm can dismiss staff is asking half the right question, since the underlying resourcing pressure is the same in either kind of market and only its visible symptoms differ: a freeze on hiring and promotion rather than a visible round of cuts, or more delivery work shifted toward subcontracted or offshore capacity in place of new local hires, or pressure toward negotiated exits rather than contested dismissals, and contract or fixed-term roles left to lapse instead of renewed.

None of this can be seen in a growth-rate figure or an acquisition announcement, and all of it is more common in practice than a formal redundancy program, in markets where headcount is expensive to remove quickly.

DSAG’s Investitionsreport, published in 2026, found only 43 percent of respondents planning higher SAP-specific spending this year, down from 46 percent two years earlier, with 28 percent now expecting cuts, against 19 percent who said the same in 2024.

Growth that several consultancies are still marketing rests, at least there, on customer demand that’s already cooling, one step removed from any consultancy’s own headline number.

The more useful question, given all this, is whether a firm will still be investing in you, promoting you, and keeping your work close to your existing client base and location a year from now.

Four Numbers, and What to Do With Each

Three moments in a career call for this kind of question: before accepting an offer, when a rate or promotion conversation is already happening at a review, and the moment acquisition or restructuring rumors start moving through a firm. How direct you can be rises to match the moment. A live negotiation allows for sharper questions than a first interview does.

Start with the organic share of growth. Ask what share of the firm’s headcount growth over the last two years came from acquisition rather than new client demand. A specific answer with a genuine organic majority is a good sign, and it opens a natural follow-up: which new practice area or seniority tier that growth is creating, and how you put yourself forward for it.

A vague answer, or one that admits most of it came from acquired revenue, calls for a written commitment on where your own team’s delivery work will actually sit, rather than a general reassurance about the firm’s overall direction.

If the firm in front of you was itself bought within the last two or three years, keep in mind that earnout deals in this market are commonly tied to consultant retention and pipeline delivery over that period, giving outgoing leadership a strong reason to keep retention numbers looking healthy regardless of what’s happening underneath.

Profitability per head matters more than the growth line itself.

A handful of the largest, publicly listed SAP-focused consultancies disclose adjusted profit and margin figures in their regular investor reporting, so checking the trend before an interview can put the headline number in perspective.

A privately held firm won’t publish anything comparable, so revenue per consultant, estimated by dividing public turnover figures by a LinkedIn-visible headcount, is the closest substitute, and a firm’s refusal to discuss that tells you something too.

A margin holding steady or improving alongside headcount growth is a reason to ask about any opportunities for a stretch assignment, or accelerated promotion. A margin falling while hiring continues is a reason to lock in something concrete now, a certification budget or a named training commitment, before any cost program reaches your part of the organization.

Then there’s utilization, and where the delivery work actually sits.

Ask if delivery for your practice area is moving toward subcontracted or offshore capacity, and on what timeline. A firm that gives a specific, bounded answer is one in which you can negotiate your own position. A firm that answers with talk of global delivery flexibility, without a number or a date, is telling you the decision is being made somewhere else.

The trend on an employer review platform over the past year, rather than its headline score, adds a fourth layer of circumstantial evidence, especially when a spike in review volume lines up with an acquisition or restructuring announcement, or a quick search turns up a recent large-scale reorganization at the firm. Treat these as directional signals rather than precise measurements, useful mainly when one of the direct questions above isn’t available to you.

That distinction matters by seniority, too. A practice lead will give a principal consultant a real answer to the first and third questions above. The same question from someone earlier in their career more often gets a polished non-answer, which is why the public numbers and the review-site trend are useful information for anyone who hasn’t yet built the standing to ask a partner directly.

Reading Growth for What It Is

The same growth, broken down into where it came from, what it costs per head, and where the delivery work actually sits, is the right way to judge an employer here, not the published growth figure alone.

None of this is an argument against joining or staying at a firm that happens to be expanding quickly. The encouraging findings above are just as real as the discouraging ones.

Stable employment, on this reading, can be found with the firm whose growth, whatever pace it runs at, is matched by its margin, by a senior bench deep enough to support it, and by a willingness to show the numbers behind the headline.

Treat this as a yearly review rather than a one-time decision. Run the same four checks again roughly on your own review cycle, and immediately if your employer turns up in acquisition or restructuring news.

If you are a professional looking for a new role as a consultant in the SAP ecosystem our team of dedicated recruitment consultants can advise you on your reskilling strategy, and recommend a specific pathway to steady employment, so join our exclusive community at IgniteSAP.