The SAP Talent Gap: Why It’s Your Biggest Transformation Risk

At SAP TechEd Berlin 2025, I had the chance to sit down for a one-on-one conversation with Daniel Yu, CMO of SAP Business Data Cloud. We spoke less about features and roadmaps, and more about where SAP is actually heading over the next few years.

One thing became very clear from that conversation that SAP is innovating faster than ever before. From RPT-1 models to AI agents, extensions on SAP BTP, automation, robotics, and even quantum computing, the pace is remarkable.

SAP is no longer evolving in small steps; it’s moving in leaps.

And that is where I paused to reflect. While the technology is accelerating, how ready are organisations to actually make use of it?

Do they have the right talent to catch up with the pace of innovation?

And, unfortunately, the answer is not yet.

Innovation Is Racing Ahead, But Skills Are Not

Many organisations are still struggling to adopt what is already available today, let alone what is coming next. Some are still running on legacy ERP systems and have not yet migrated to S/4HANA, often due to comfort with existing ways of working. Others continue to rely heavily on classic SAP GUI transactions instead of adopting SAP Fiori 3.0. While the technology is heading towards agentic AI flows.

Even organisations that are already in the midst of their S/4HANA transformation face new challenges. They should follow a clean core approach, which means integrations, extensions, automation, and analytics live primarily on SAP BTP. As a result, SAP BTP talent has quietly become one of the biggest bottlenecks in transformation programs.

The challenge is that BTP roles demand rare, overlapping skill sets, such as deep SAP process knowledge, cloud-native development experience, and strong expertise in integration, security, and governance architecture.

And, these profiles are difficult to find, expensive to retain, and extremely costly to replace when things go wrong.

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New Talent Pipeline Is Limited

According to surveys conducted across Australia, the United States, and Europe, SAP talent is reaching a tipping point. Many enterprise SAP teams are made up of highly experienced professionals who carry deep institutional knowledge, but that knowledge is increasingly concentrated in a shrinking, ageing workforce.

A significant number of these professionals are approaching retirement, and there are not enough junior or mid-level SAP consultants entering the ecosystem to absorb that experience and grow into the next generation of SAP solution architects and technical leads.

At the same time, the pipeline of new talent is not developing quickly enough. Many consultants leave the SAP ecosystem early in their careers due to its growing complexity, or, put simply, the rapid pace of innovation.

Today’s SAP landscape spans multiple interconnected layers, from S/4HANA and Fiori to BTP, integration, security, cloud platforms, and agentic AI. For junior consultants, this complexity can feel overwhelming, leading some to exit before they have the opportunity to build depth and experience in the field.

In simple terms, far fewer new practitioners are entering SAP compared to the number of senior experts who are retiring.

This creates a major risk for both talent supply and knowledge transfer. Organisations are increasingly relying on the same group of experts to modernise landscapes, adopt new platforms, and mentor others, often all at the same time.

As a result, knowledge transfer struggles to keep pace, and the gap between what needs to be delivered and who can deliver it continues to widen.

Why the Talent Gap Becomes a Transformation Risk

A recent global business survey reported that 52 % of companies are facing acute talent shortages, highlighting that skilled professionals are harder to find than ever. In fact, skills shortages are now consistently cited as one of the biggest barriers to successful business transformation worldwide.

The SAP talent gap does not remain abstract for long. It shows up in very specific and costly ways during transformation initiatives.

1. Legacy Thinking Slows Modernisation

Many SAP teams are still heavily staffed with ECC-centric expertise. While this experience is valuable, it often shapes how transformation decisions are made. Such as replicating old transaction logic in S/4HANA, rebuilding SAP GUI behaviour in SAP Fiori, or missing opportunities for true process simplification.

Without sufficient S/4HANA and Fiori experience, organisations technically modernise the platform, but continue working in the same way. Thus, the system that looks new on the surface behaves very much like the old one underneath.

2. Over-Customisation Becomes the Default

When teams are not fully familiar with standard SAP capabilities, especially in S/4HANA and Fiori, custom development often becomes the path of least resistance. They build custom solutions instead of adopting standard Fiori apps, extend functionality where configuration would have been sufficient, and accumulate technical debt early in the program.

This directly conflicts with Clean Core principles and increases long-term maintenance effort, upgrade complexity, and overall cost of ownership.

3. Key Skills Become Bottlenecks, Not Accelerators

In many SAP transformation programmes, progress depends on a very small number of specialists. It is not uncommon to see an entire initiative relying on one experienced Fiori architect, one integration expert, and one SAP BTP security or governance specialist to keep things moving.

At the start, this often feels manageable. These experts are highly capable and deeply trusted, so decisions naturally flow through them. Over time, however, they become critical path dependencies without anyone realising it.

As workloads increase, these individuals are pulled into design reviews, issue resolution, testing support, and stakeholder discussions, all at once. When they are unavailable, overloaded, or step away from the project, momentum slows almost immediately.

Decisions get delayed, teams wait for guidance, and delivery timelines begin to slip. Quality starts to suffer as teams make assumptions in the absence of expert input, and organisations become increasingly dependent on external resources to fill the gaps.

This not only drives up cost but also makes knowledge retention and continuity much harder to maintain.

To address this dependency, it is essential to ask specialists to document their knowledge in the form of playbooks or reference guides. This enables internal teams to gradually take ownership and confidently lead the work themselves.

4. Knowledge Gaps Surface Late, When Fixing Them Is Most Expensive

One of the most challenging aspects of the SAP talent gap is that it often does not show itself early. At the start of a transformation program, everything can appear to be on track. Designs are approved, timelines look realistic, and progress feels steady.

The problems usually emerge later.

Design decisions are often made without a full understanding of S/4HANA simplifications, standard Fiori capabilities, or clean-core implications. At the time, these decisions seem reasonable, especially when teams are working under pressure and relying on familiar patterns from ECC.

It is only during integration testing, user acceptance testing, or sometimes even after go-live that the gaps become visible.

Processes do not quite work as expected, user experience falls short, or technical choices start to limit flexibility. By then, fixing the issues is no longer a matter of simple configuration.

Corrections at this stage typically involve redesigning solutions, retraining users, or reworking parts of the implementation. And this is where the impact goes beyond technology. Timelines slip, user confidence takes a hit, and stakeholder trust becomes harder to maintain.

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What Organisations Should Do Next? Invest In Team Training Programmes

If the SAP talent gap has shown us anything, it is this: waiting is no longer a neutral decision. The pace of SAP innovation will not slow down to match organisational readiness, and transformation programs cannot succeed on technology alone.

From what I see across customer engagements, organisations that navigate this challenge successfully do not try to “solve” the talent gap overnight.

Instead, they take a more deliberate and realistic approach.

The first shift is recognising that skills readiness must be treated as a core transformation workstream. Just as organisations plan their S/4HANA roadmap, data migration, and testing strategy, they must also plan how capabilities will evolve over time.

This means being honest about current strengths and gaps. Not every team needs deep expertise in every SAP innovation, but every organisation does need clarity on:

• Which skills are critical for their specific SAP roadmap
• Where standard SAP capabilities can reduce complexity
• Where external expertise is required to set direction and guardrails

Leading organisations also resist the temptation to over-customise simply because skills are missing. Instead, they use standard SAP solutions deliberately, simplify where possible, and protect a clean core to reduce long-term dependency on scarce expertise.

Equally important is creating space for learning. Upskilling in the SAP ecosystem cannot be achieved through ad-hoc training or certifications alone. It requires hands-on exposure and mentoring so they can apply new concepts in real project scenarios.

At AvoTechs, we provide SAP team training based on real transformation bottlenecks we see on live projects. We offer modern technical training for teams based on deep, hands-on technical workshops. The objective is to equip enterprise teams to close critical skill gaps and reduce dependency on a small number of specialists.

If your SAP roadmap is outpacing your team’s skills, it’s time to act.
Contact us to explore how our hands-on SAP training programmes help teams close critical skill gaps.