Social discussions relayed by the media regularly bring to the forefront the difficulties of maintaining one's purchasing power, of finding a job in France, and even of retraining when the position in which one has been trained becomes obsolete.
This article, aimed at young graduates, aims to present a profession for which :
- You will easily find a job; the labour market offers more positions than there are candidates,
- Your assignments will allow you to discover multiple work environments,
- Your development will enable you to acquire working methods and rigour that can be used in many other fields,
- You will be working in a client-supplier relationship, which I believe is an asset in tomorrow's world.
This job is the SAP BI consultant at Bilink solutions: https: //www.bilinksolutions.com/carriere-en-business-intelligence/.
Without claiming that it is the only one that meets these criteria, I would like to do some publicity for my profession, seeing the career opportunities that exist and the lack of knowledge of it among young graduates (myself the first one to leave school).
About the author
I graduated from university with a double degree (Computer Science Engineer "ISIMA" and Master 2 in Information Systems Management "IONIS education group") with, like most students, a relatively vague idea of the job I could do in a company. During an interview, I had a very good human contact with my future first manager who spoke to me for the first time about SAP and BI. At the time I wanted to have a first professional experience during an internship and then re-evaluate the situation.
I took the plunge without any further knowledge, either about SAP[1] or about BI[2].
Figure 1- The path to the destination
Why consulting jobs, especially BI consulting, are not very popular
Today, working in IT is not a dream for students. It's a shame, from my point of view, but it's a fact.
I think this is a shame for two main reasons:
- Confusion between a job and the tasks to be performed on a daily basis,
- The opportunities that exist in our field.
Do not confuse a trade/sector with the tasks to be performed
The reasons often revolve around the image of the profession for which the young graduate projects himself. Few people dream of working in IT, yet today all executives work on a computer. Do they work in IT for all that?
Many young people dream of working in the event industry, seeing only the visible part of the iceberg (the organisation of the Paris 2024 Olympics, the Cannes Festival and the red carpets). But in this case, the majority of working days will be punctuated by telephone calls, canvassing, and organising calendars or schedules.
The same remarks can be made about many other jobs that make people dream, but where little is known about the day-to-day tasks involved. Who has thought about how much time a marketing employee spends in front of an Excel spreadsheet, creating PowerPoint presentations, or other uncreative activities?
At the same time I realised that the image my relatives or students have of my daily tasks is really far from reality. I don't spend most of my time "developing programs" or in front of a black screen with green characters (cf. Matrix). On the other hand, the tasks in my job that give me satisfaction on a daily basis are not well known, which is a pity when it comes to making a choice.
The opportunities offered by the BI consulting profession are not well known
The first opportunity to consider is the ease of obtaining a position and then turning it into a permanent contract.
Today, the business intelligence consulting sector is suffering from a lack of candidates. Many companies are ready to train young people to feed their project teams in the near future. Few companies will look at the prior knowledge of the tools used (SAP, SAP BW, Business Object, etc.).
The efforts made by these companies in training a trainee and integrating him/her into the project teams are made with the ultimate aim of recruiting the trainee on a permanent basis at the end of the course.
Obtaining an internship is certainly a laudable first objective, however, the aim is to be employable afterwards, either through a promise of employment at the end of the internship, or by obtaining a permanent contract in another company as a result of the experience acquired during the internship. In this respect it is important to distinguish between internships in which the intern will learn something reusable, and internships in which the intern will produce without learning. The risk of the latter is to be trapped in a position occupied year after year by trainees and not destined to be transformed into a permanent contract.
The second very interesting opportunity to bear in mind is the fact of evolving in a so-called "transverse" position.
In the language of business, the notion of transversality is the fact of not working for a single domain, but several (and therefore learning to work with people who share completely different objectives and professions).
The BI consultant will in fact evolve permanently within a project team in an IT department. They will nevertheless work in contact with their users, who are attached to the company's various business lines (purchasing, sales, management control, R&D, finance, quality control, etc.).
The consultant may also be required to work in several different companies (clients) depending on the assignments to be carried out. In less than three years, this allows them to have a diverse enough experience to be better equipped for future job interviews (by knowing the different jobs in the company, as well as the differences between these jobs from one company to another). Indeed, during a job interview, the recruiter will be more interested in understanding the interactions you had, rather than a list of your tasks and responsibilities (which differ greatly from one context to another). Knowledge of the multiple environments in which you have evolved is the best way to open a dialogue when changing jobs or recruiting.
Employability in tomorrow's world
Fewer and fewer people spend their careers in the same job or in the same company. We are all aware of this, but how do we translate it into the qualities we need in a constantly changing world?
In my opinion, the qualities needed to remain employable are the following:
- Adaptability,
- Transversality,
- The ability to imagine and propose new ways of doing things,
- The understanding (and acceptance) of how a business generates added value and makes money.
What the BI consulting profession can offer the world of tomorrow
The BI consulting profession helps to keep doors open for further career development by developing the qualities mentioned above.
Adaptability
Having the opportunity to work for different clients, to create the same analyses but taking into account different objectives, helps to question what you take for granted, while keeping it for another situation.
This ability to approach the same subject in many different ways is a real asset in professional and personal life.
Technological tools also change rapidly, by becoming a BI consultant at Bilink you will be trained year after year on the new products which allows you not to stop learning as soon as you get your first job.
Transversality
Working alongside several professions in the same company (buyers, financiers, plant managers, salespeople, etc.) gives you a better idea of the positions and tasks performed by these people and thus a better understanding of their jobs.
Figure 3 - Transversality is a struggle (http://marctraverson.com/bizculture/239/)
The ability to imagine and propose new ways of doing things
Our world is changing rapidly. Most of the jobs that will exist in 20 years' time certainly don't exist yet. In this context, it is important to remain imaginative and not to restrict oneself to what one has already achieved, hoping that this will be enough until one is sixty (let's not open the debate on the retirement age).
By being a BI consultant you will find yourself tomorrow with clients refusing a solution that has already proven itself elsewhere and that you have mastered. This is the best way to force yourself to think outside the box and reinvent new solutions.
The understanding (and acceptance) of how a business generates added value and makes money.
By becoming a BI consultant you will be working in the field of service. Your company will invoice your clients for your services, you will have the knowledge, and creating value for your client will be part of your concerns in the right sense of the word.
Every company wants to have employees who help it generate value for its customers, survive, and grow.
I am always surprised to see so many people for whom this aspect remains in second or third place. Yet it is one of the first criteria that will be evaluated by your superiors during your career: "Does this employee, and the position he or she holds, help my company to achieve its objectives?
Being aware of this is a first step in understanding the professional world, and especially its evolution.
About the technical aspect
To conclude, I wanted to make an aside on the technical aspect, which may seem off-putting. In my introduction, I presented myself as a double graduate; computer engineer, then information system manager. The reason for this second degree was my desire not to pursue a career in the world of IT development. A BI consultant is not a developer. I understood this little by little, but from the beginning I appreciated the fact that I could bring value to my client without having to go through a code editor.
The SAP and BI world allows you to work in contact with the business, and therefore to intervene much further upstream in the "V cycle" than a developer or "computer scientist" position.
N.D.A. The V-cycle is an IT project methodology (as opposed to agile methodologies) that can be divided into three successive phases: Definition, Implementation, Validation.
BI is still a technical field, but it is perfectly feasible for a person with no programming knowledge to learn it and the doors that can be opened afterwards allow you to detach yourself from the technical side while maintaining credibility in the eyes of both business and technical contacts.
It is this richness that I hope you will keep in mind at the end of this reading.
To find out more about the BI consulting profession, please visit: https: //cadres.apec.fr/Emploi/Marche-Emploi/Fiches-Apec/Fiches-metiers/Metiers-Par-Categories/Informatique/consultant-informatique-decisionnelle-big-data
I look forward to continuing this introduction with a more personal discussion.
[1] SAP : SAP is the leading European software company. Its flagship product is the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This solution is installed in more than 100,000 companies in over 100 different countries around the world.
[2] BI Acronym for Business Intelligence, which describes the solutions that make it possible to exploit the data of a company to create dashboards. In French, this is known as "l'aide à la décision". SAP's BI offering includes the SAP BW data warehouse, the SAP Business Object reporting platform and the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. The SAP HANA database can also be considered a BI solution depending on the uses to which it is put.
Emilien Gaignette
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