Dear community, an MM consultant contacted me on LinkedIn. First of all, nothing special. People are happy about contacts. However, he asked if I could give him advice – advice on how to learn ABAP. Since there is no easy answer to this question for me, I suggested a phone call. Because of the common mother tongue, this was simply possible. We had that call today. A really nice person looking for information on how to learn ABAP. Of course you want to help ?

After he shared his experiences so far, I was able to make some recommendations. I also suggested that he should ask the SAP community (wisdom of the crowd): My recommendations are based on my experience. Other developers can make other recommendations that may help him a lot more.

So I hope for your support. What recommendations would you give to a beginner who wants to learn modern ABAP?

In order to stimulate the discussion, I have put together some of the topics that I find important in this context. First of all, a suggestion for the procedure (perhaps not the perfect order):

1. Find a company that supports you.
2. Get to know and team up with your colleagues. They should write modern ABAP.
3. Take ABAP basic courses and learn the fundamentals.
4. Make your first experiences in small projects. Your colleagues should support you.
5. Build your skills. There is no end.
6. Take on more responsibility over time.
7. Share your experiences.

Here is a list of some skills that I find important. You don’t have to master them all, but a good combination and an average level may be helpful. The skills that you lack yourself should be compensated by friends and colleagues. In a team you have to find the right place and bring the performance that you can contribute. Nobody is perfect ?

Hard skills (technologies, methods, procedures)

• programming object-oriented, than procedural (ABAP on premises and cloud)
• application design (reportings, classic dynpros, Fiori, …)
• interface design (JSON, XML, REST, OData, IDoc, RFC …)
• typical data structures (see DDIC)
• business process knowledge (choose your module)
• Core Data Services
• design patterns
• Clean ABAP
• ABAP Unit
• first ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse, then Workbench
• abapGit
• Unified Modeling Language
• Code Reviews

Soft skills

• analytical skills
• interest in new things
• communicative
• social
• empathic
• good writing skills
• organized

Just to name a few. As I said, in my opinion nobody can have them all.

What do you think?

Best regards, thanks for reading and please stay healthy

Michael