SALARY COMPARISON STUDY OF SAP VS. NON-SAP BUSINESS GRADUATES

Abstract

SAP is an enterprise resource planning information system (ERP) and is a comprehensive, packaged software integrating a complete range of business processes and functions in order to provide a broad view of business within a single information system. Today, over 850 of the Fortune 1000 run SAP as their ERP system. In 1997, Central Michigan University (CMU) signed an alliance with SAP becoming one of the first universities to begin educating its students about ERP by using the SAP software to support various business courses. CMU has offered more than eighteen different SAP supported business courses in its business curriculum as well as offering the SAP Certification Academy to its business students. This study surveyed CMU’s business graduates on three separate occasions over the past eight years to determine if there was a difference in starting salaries for those who had taken one or more SAP supported classes versus those business graduates who had not taken any SAP classes. The results of the study indicates business graduates with SAP classes received substantially higher starting salaries than business graduates who had not taken any SAP classes. The average starting salary of SAP business graduates was $4,056 greater than non-SAP business graduates, and for some business majors, the differential was as great as $9,562.