Well coming from a similar angle.
I have studied engineering and worked in IT for the most part. I primarily did Microsoft Tech (C#/SQL etc) and ended up at a company having SAP. So they sent me to get SAP Certified in ABAP. Here's my thoughts:
1. It's crazy expensive, the course in total was about 100k . It's a FOUR WEEK academy ending with an exam to get a certification
2. You do not have to do these courses. You can buy the books and write the exam and only pay for the exam (like R3k).
Very similar to Microsoft certifications really.
3. In this academy i was surrounded by a combination of people like,
[a] People like me with years of development experience who got sent their by their employer (this is the more common person it seems)
Completely "green-straight-out-of-high-school" people who doesn't even know what object orientation meant.
So i found ABAP to be easy and almost a little overkill to do such a course. It's a well defined language, it's fully object orientated (classes,inheritance,polymorphism etc etc) and if you're remotely familiar with something like Java or C# , it's a bit of a cake walk. Half of the ABAP academy is "fundementals" of programming, like object orientation. I distinctly remember being bored out of my mind one of the 4 weeks as the lecturer was trying to explain ALL these concepts (interfaces,static classes etc) in one week to people who's idea of programming is writing an Excel Macro. Very frustrating.
Either way , the people in the academy is exposed to job offers either directly with SAP or from their partners, right there at the academy. So they help people get placed.
However, i still believe having a degree behind me was still the better move. I could see these young people , totally clueless, they are on the course but they have no clue what they're really doing. They don't understand "systems" or "programming" on a fundamental level, they know where to click in SAP and what the ABAP syntax is, but in the long run you would want to be language agnostic. Chances are these junior ABAPers become code monkeys, not the glorious SAP consultant you imagine.
Remember ABAP is NOT the same as being an expert in SAP Functional modules. You get people who specialise in say Finance or Production or Sales on SAP , they are the ones doing implementations and "consulting". I bet most ABAPers write reports and enhancements and maaayybe write an full blown actual program that runs in SAP.
The most important part, remember SAP is just one system. Not everyone uses SAP. It's something that can disappear as fast as Nokia or Blackberry. I definitely feel SAP is extremely expensive and combined with the complexity, alot of companies struggle to cope with it. In most cases companies are relying on outside consultants to maintain their systems , very expensive and people don't use the system as well as if they were managing it themselves.
So i would rather have a broader education that covers all the fundementals and then having SAP as a "specialization" , rather than only having SAP and being "stuck" when you suddenly want to change jobs and go do Mobile Development or something.
