this was my thinking. as a fellow dinosaur (couple decades of cobol programming here) the market early on was wide and varied...now its narrow and vanishing (or so Im often told). However...those who still use it (either by necessity, shallow pockets or fear of progressing to the next level) often go to great lengths to retain those who know the old ways well enough to stem off having to spend the bazillion dollars upgrading to the next level.

get a good head hunter in addition to doing your own searches. do lesser contracts for more money. make the old ways your specialty instead of your liability. a great many companies out there still need us both. while doing so, start taking on some of the SAP stuff.

your skills after that many years far...FAR exceed just the knowledge of a language. "the biz" as my mentor once told me, goes eons beyond simple languages. you could be a IT/user liason. knowing how, where, when and why to work with the end users is a career all to itself. knowing how to translate one to the other is more valuable than gold to the right employer.

a tinkers damn

A company I worked for in LA switched over to SAP - ack it was a nightmare. Totally un-user friendly.

Do you have any collegues that may have had to make similar switchovers that you could network with?

I've sent out some exploratory emails to some former coworkers who moved on to bigger and better things. Both would be in positions to offer me jobs, and have told me that if I am ever in need of work to call them. The problem is I don't want to move out of Phoenix to their locations (one of which is Sacramento....no offense, Sac). My two younger would adjust, but my 12 year old would be devastated, as would the wife and I.

a number of companies use telecommuting for consultants and contractors. many I've worked with in the past would fly off to a job interview off and on and work from remote locations via secured networks.

alot of it was just helping a company thru grunt work, but from the numbers I saw, some grunt work pays pretty darn well.

just a thought

SAP is flexible enough for a wide array of applications.

Which means it doesn't work well for any of them.

It's funny, Kevy....everyone I've talked to that has migrated to SAP or has worked with it hates it. Conversions are typically twice as long as anticipated and twice as costly as budgeted. But for some reason, they are the thing.

What makes me sick is the $8 million conversion estimate equates to about 30 years of operations and modifications in what they currently use, it works for all they need, and they are complaining about having to cut costs.

$8 MIllion for SAP? We are moving that direction over the next four years and will be spending orders of magnitude more. There' some money to be made in knowing SAP. The more I learn about the more gaps I see in what it does and what a company would like it to do. Plugging those holes could easily take one to retirement.

An encouraging update......

My partner (who handles the business end of the business) has done some calling to a few old friends he still has within the organization and the current IT manager (my partner used to be the financial controller for this particular place).

Apparently they are six months to a year from even making the official decision to go SAP, but there is no question what the decision will be. Once the decision is made, they are looking at probably four years of conversion. Their IT department is not going to be consumed by corporate.

Their IT manager was very interested in keeping us around should I learn SAP. The knowledge I have of their systems (crud, I've written 90% of what they use) is far more valuable than lots of experience with SAP, and even with my confiscatory rates, I am cheaper than hiring someone locally (primarily due to geography related higher pay requirements and benefits and employment taxes). My learning curve, after acquiring basic SAP knowledge, would be in conversion of the system over time. Of course, I have no idea what the platform requirements are for working with SAP locally.....something else I need to learn.

So....now I need to look into SAP training, the timing of when I need to do it, and what it will cost. The husband of the athletic department secretary where I coach works for SAP (or whatever the name of the company is that owns it), so I am going to contact him to assist in finding out such info.

That's only the local cost for this shop. From what I understand, corporate wide the cost is a staggering 9 figure number. Yes, over one hundred million dollars.

I find it so incredibly hard to believe that any system is worth that much money.

Personally, I never did go in for all that instructor lead stuff...

As a starting point, might I suggest..