Advice to a Young ERP Consultant Part 3:
Finding Your Niche.
To reiterate, as a Young ERP Consultant, you have a problem. You are paid to know stuff, but you don't know stuff yet. And there's too much ERP stuff to learn everything all at once, so you should use a T-shaped Learning Approach.
Gain a broad, high-level understanding of how your ERP works (the horizontal part of the T), and then develop deep understanding in a narrow part of the system (the vertical part of the T).
If you have a less-than-average understanding of lots of parts of the system, you are a liability. If you have a greater-than-average understanding of one specific part of the system, you are an asset. You want to be an asset. Become an asset as quickly as you can.
But how do you decide what to specialize in?
ADVICE PART 3: Find Your Niche.
Your situation, Your experience, Your talents, and Your ERP system will be unique - you are a special snowflake - so it is hard to give specific advice, but here are some thoughts.
PROCESSES FROM YOUR EXPERIENCE - perhaps you worked for an end-user as an AP clerk or in a collections department before your life as a Young ERP Consultant. Use that life experience as a compounding advantage. Just remember "I used to do this as an end-user" doesn't equal deep consulting understanding of a process. You need to dig deeper.
SMALL MODULE - Main modules like "Accounts Payable" are too big for a niche (you'd want to focus on a specific part of the AP process). Something smaller like a Fixed Assets module might be a good niche candidate.
NEW FEATURE - Be definition, nobody is an expert on newly released features. This is a level playing field for you to build expertise even Old ERP Consultants who haven't put in the time/attention to keeping up may lack. (specialized, rare expertise = ASSET)
TOOLS - Mastering WORKFLOW or REPORTING TOOLS can be a nice niche. One example from my ERP (D365): there is a tool called Financial Reports for building...Financial Reports (the names are super-creative). If you have a background and aptitude for building Financial Reports, you could build an entire career with that one tool. (Suggestion: when choosing a niche, it is better if you enjoy doing that particular work)
DATA MIGRATION - Data migration is excellent practice for Young ERP Consultants. ERP screens aren't magic, they rely on data in structured tables. It is important that you (Young ERP Consultant) understand the data structures and what can/cannot be done within them.
Good luck finding your Niche!
Remember your end-goal isn't having one niche, but rather building a niche is your quickest path to becoming an asset at the start of your career.
How do you develop deep learning within your niche? We'll cover that in our next issue.
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