SAP is organised into modules, one for each part of a business, and a functional consultant usually specialises in one. Materials Management is the module named most in job posts, by a wide margin, and it covers buying goods, receiving them, keeping them in stock and paying for them. It is the natural home of the goods companies, the manufacturers, retailers, distributors and oil companies whose GCCs hire for SAP, and it leads at the staffing companies and the logistics GCCs. SAP EWM, extended warehouse management, sits beside it for running a warehouse itself, and it appears most at Accenture and the retailers. The other modules, finance and controlling, sales and distribution, production planning, plant maintenance and human resources, are described in the text of job posts rather than named as skills, so they do not show in the counts, but the finance, sales and materials modules are the three a counsellor hears about most.

The functional consultant's work is configuration: setting up the company's organisation, its chart of accounts, its pricing rules, its approval chains and its document flows inside the standard product, so that an order placed in one module creates the stock movement, the delivery, the invoice and the accounting entry in the others without anyone writing code. Understanding how those modules hand work to each other is the heart of the functional skill.

Where configuration runs out, a developer writes code, and the language of SAP is ABAP. It is the most-named skill in the role after SAP itself, and in the technical job posts it is the core. ABAP is used for reports, for custom screens, for enhancements that change how a standard process behaves, and for the interfaces that carry data in and out. The tools around it appear by name. BAPI is the set of standard functions a developer calls to create or change business objects such as orders and invoices safely. IDoc is the document format SAP uses to exchange data with other systems, and building and fixing IDoc interfaces is everyday technical work, most at the GCCs and staffing companies. SmartForms, SAPscript and ALV are the older tools for printed forms, such as invoices and purchase orders, and for list reports, and they still appear because every company has hundreds of them.

SAP HANA is the in-memory database that modern SAP runs on, and it changed how ABAP is written: the work moves into the database, and Core Data Services, named in a fair share of job posts and in a large share of ABAP ones, is the way of defining data views that run there. An ABAP developer today is expected to write Core Data Services views and let SAP HANA do the heavy lifting, which is what a job post means by ABAP on HANA. SQL is named in a fair share of job posts, more at the GCCs, because the developer also reads the tables directly.

SAP Fiori is the modern face of SAP, a set of simple, role-based screens that replace the dense transaction screens the platform was known for, and it is named in a fair share of job posts, most at the retailers' GCCs and in the technical services firms. SAPUI5 is the web framework Fiori apps are built with, in JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and a Fiori developer builds and adapts those apps, connects them to Core Data Services views behind them, and makes the standard screens fit the company. Frontend skills are tagged on a small share of job posts, almost all for this.

A company's SAP system is never alone. It has to exchange data with the warehouse, the bank, the e-commerce site, the customer system, suppliers and the company's other platforms, and integration is a kind of job in its own right. IDoc is the oldest form of it. SAP BTP Integration Suite is the modern one, the cloud toolkit SAP sells for connecting its systems to others, and it is named in a fair share of job posts. Boomi, Oracle Integration Cloud and Azure Integration Services are the general-purpose integration platforms named beside it. A sizeable set of Accenture's job posts describe exactly this kind of integration work, listing SAP BTP Integration Suite and Oracle Integration Cloud together with the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Experience Cloud, which is the engineer connecting SAP to the company's customer platform. Data movement between systems is tagged on a fair share of job posts, most at the GCCs. Where a GCC also runs ServiceNow or Salesforce, those appear beside SAP in its job posts.

The single project driving SAP hiring is the move from SAP ECC, the version most large companies have run for twenty years, to SAP S/4HANA, the version built on SAP HANA. SAP S/4HANA is named in a fair share of job posts overall and in most at the staffing companies and the logistics GCCs, because a migration is a project, and projects are staffed with contractors and senior people. SAP ECC is named where the company has not moved yet or has to keep both running. A migration means a functional consultant mapping the old configuration onto the new product and a developer rewriting the custom ABAP that no longer fits, which is why both kinds of skill are asked for together on these job posts.

The cloud is named in a smaller share of SAP job posts than in any engineering role, because SAP is usually run by SAP itself or by a hosting partner. Azure is named most, then AWS and GCP, mostly at the GCCs where S/4HANA runs on a public cloud. Databases and SQL are tagged on a fair share of job posts, and reporting, with Power BI on top of SAP data, on a small share at the GCCs. Build and release is tagged on a fair share of job posts, but it means something different here: SAP changes move between development, test and production through its own transport system, not through a Jenkins pipeline, and the tag mostly reflects Git and the ordinary process around it. Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions appear in a few GCC job posts where Fiori and BTP code is released like ordinary code.

A minority of job posts, most at the GCCs and the product companies that sell software on top of SAP, want Java, .NET or C# beside it, for the applications that sit around the platform. Workday, Salesforce and ServiceNow appear in a few job posts where the engineer is the company's platform generalist. In the ordinary SAP job these are a plus.

Underneath all of it sits the way SAP work is done: requirements gathered from the business, configuration and code documented and tested, changes moved through transports with sign-off at each stage, and support once live. Job posts count these as given and rarely list them as skills.

An SAP engineer who knows one module well, most often Materials Management, understands how it hands work to finance and sales, writes ABAP with Core Data Services on SAP HANA, can build and fix an IDoc or BAPI interface, has worked on or towards SAP S/4HANA, and can read a Fiori screen, meets the core of nearly every job post. The variations belong to the employer. Accenture, the widest door by far, wants every module and describes most roles in general terms, with ABAP, Fiori and Materials Management the commonest named asks, and a large set of integration roles that connect SAP to other platforms. The technical services firms want ABAP, Fiori and S/4HANA above all. The GCCs of manufacturers, retailers, distributors and oil companies want senior people who keep the parent's SAP running and move it to S/4HANA, with IDoc, SAP ECC, the cloud and the most reporting and integration. The staffing companies place senior S/4HANA and Materials Management people onto migration projects. Across all of them, the engineer who understands the business process first and the code second is the one every job post describes.