How to get hired
ABAP developers build what standard SAP doesn't do: custom reports, forms like invoices and delivery notes, interfaces with other systems, enhancements to standard screens and, increasingly, apps on SAP Fiori. Unlike functional consultants, developers can get in as freshers, because firms train coders.
Campus at IT services and consulting firms
This is how most ABAP developers start. You join as a graduate engineer trainee, sit through general training, and get mapped to the SAP practice, sometimes without asking for it. If you want ABAP, say it in the allocation form and in your HR interview, and show you have already written some. Read the bond clause in your offer before you sign; our bond guide explains which ones hold up. Practice the coding rounds with our software freshers interview guide.
Teach yourself on a real system, for free
You don't need a paid "server access" plan from an institute. SAP gives a free ABAP environment trial on SAP BTP, which you reach with ABAP Development Tools in Eclipse. It runs modern ABAP Cloud, which is the direction SAP is pushing every customer. Students still enrolled in college also get the SAP Learning Hub student edition free, with two certification exam attempts. If an institute sells access to an "IDES server", ask whose licence it runs on.
Moving across from Java, .NET or testing
Developers with two or three years in another language move into ABAP inside their own company more easily than outside it: ask to join the SAP practice's next S/4HANA conversion project. Testers on SAP projects can make the same move once they can read the code they test.
Certification
The current developer certification is "SAP Certified – Back-End Developer – ABAP Cloud" (code C_ABAPD). It tests modern ABAP: Core Data Services (CDS) views, the RESTful Application Programming model (RAP), and ABAP SQL. Like all SAP certifications now, it needs a short Stay Certified assessment each year.
What interviews check
Expect both old and new ABAP, because most clients have both:
- Classic: internal tables and performance, ALV reports, BAPIs, BAdIs and user exits, Smart Forms or Adobe Forms, IDocs, BDC versus BAPI for uploads.
- Modern: CDS views and annotations, AMDP, OData services, RAP business objects, the basics of Fiori elements.
- S/4HANA: how you would find and fix custom code that breaks after a conversion (ATC checks, simplification items), and what "clean core" means for where you put enhancements.
- A short live task: read a slow SELECT inside a loop and fix it.
What the work is like
Most ABAP work arrives as a technical specification written by a functional consultant: "build an interface that sends approved POs to the vendor portal". You estimate, build, unit test, and fix defects from the functional team's testing. Support projects bring tickets: a form printing wrong, a job failing at night, an interface stuck.
S/4HANA conversions are the biggest source of ABAP work right now. Mainstream maintenance for old ECC ends in 2027 (optional extended to 2030), and every conversion means scanning thousands of custom programs, fixing what breaks and deciding what to retire.
The ladder runs Developer, Senior Developer, Technical Lead, Technical Architect. Pay rises fastest for those who add Fiori and UI5, SAP BTP, or integration (CPI) to ABAP.