By this point in the year, most of us are settled into the rhythm of work. Vacations are behind us and those projects that promised to start in “early January” are bearing fruit. We are “getting on” with business.

But in this day and age, it’s no longer good enough to “get on” with business. We have to keep our skills sharp and in alignment with the directions of our industry. And one of those trends is the convergence of technical and business skills. Sure, this has been “in-train” for over a decade, but we are rapidly getting to a point where a balance of technical and business skills is no longer a “nice to have”, but a key to career success.

And as Jon Reed points out in his excellent SAP Career Outlook 2010 – this means looking not at the skills you need in the future, but at the skills you need now. He suggests creating a “skills menu” – identifying those areas (especially in the BPX field) which you need to enhance – and that are best suited to your particular (ie current) role.

From a skills development or prioritization point of view, this means that you have to continue to maintain your core SAP skills, but begin to cultivate broader (or what Jon calls “edge”) skills. He provides a couple of examples, but there will be plenty of variations – that will apply to your own area of expertise.

Winning SAP Technical Skills Combinations

Winning SAP Functional Skills Combinations

OK – so you may have identified your Core and your Edge skills, but what do you do next? You could start by putting some Personal Learning practices in place. Be sure to read through Jon Reed’s entire article over at the SAP Career Center – and then get to back to work. There’s learning to be done.

Learning on Demand by SAP has now been live for almost a month. In this time we have received feedback from a wide variety of sources – from Twitter, on blogs and on forums – and one of the most consistent questions has been around the availability of subscriptions.

We have now made it possible for community members to purchase an annual subscription to the entire catalog of SAP eLearning courseware. For one low price of US$1799 (plus 10.3% tax), you have access to over 350 existing courses. This price also includes access to additional SAP eLearning courses as they become available.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Joe Westhuizen about Learning on Demand by SAP and the new annual subscription. In this podcast he explains, in more detail, some of the plans for the immediate future.