Ben Thompson of Stratechery has a great interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein. It’s a lot about SAP’s plans in the age of AI, but what jumped out to me was in the beginning: Klein’s educational path and what it shows about the benefits of a much tighter integration with work-based learning.
As Thompson wrote:
“Klein started working for SAP as a 15 year-old student, and became CEO in 2019 at only 39 years of age. That means that Klein is actually eight years younger than the company he leads, a rarity in tech; SAP was founded in 1972 and has been the leader in business process software, particularly ERP systems, ever since.”
How did he get there?
Here are some excerpts from the beginning of the interview:
“Klein: I indeed started my career as an intern here at SAP. I grew up in the region here, still my parents, my family and my friends are living here from school days. And then, yes, I started my career as an intern, and then I have seen so pretty much every function.
Thompson: So you mentioned it was an internship. How does a 15-year-old get hired at SAP? Is this a German thing? I’m very curious, that’s such an early age. At 15, I had a job, that was our generation, but I was making pizzas.
Klein: You can also do pizzas in Germany as an intern, for sure, but here and during school time, actually, and when you are actually in school, oftentimes you have a week, two, three weeks where you’re getting asked to find a job and the company’s here in this region, then they offer internships and it’s actually a pretty standard thing. I benefited from that because, believe it or not, even with 15 years, you can network, you can build your first connections. I got the flavor of what SAP does and it helped me to shape a little bit my thinking about what do I want to do in the future.
…
Klein: My next internship coming from it came when I was a vocational student at SAP. For example, I was working in the financial accounting department and I was fascinating by doing my general ledger recordings, my bookings in the system, and I was fascinated on how does this all fit together so I could apply my business knowhow from the university to the real world, and then how is this getting transacted, how does this finance data then get over to HR for payroll data, etc. So that is actually, I learned from the get-go on how companies won, and that fascinated me.”
It turns out that work-based opportunities integrated into one’s education can result in pretty neat career pathways. Who knew.
Check out the whole interview here. I was also struck when Klein says:
“So I had different insights into different functions, I had different mentors, and no one asked me about my age. No one asked me at the end, “What did you study?”, they all looked at, “What can you contribute, how can you help us to steer the business? How can you help us to code better software?”, and that was always fascinating to me.”
It’s all about experiences, in other words.
Thankfully, SAP is moving this to other geographies.
“Klein: The vocational student program I actually attended at the very beginning is something which we brought now also to the United States, to India where we are cooperating with the best universities, because I believe in this concept, the concept is about your working actually for four or five months in a department of SAP. If you study computer science, of course it’s more engineering-focused, if you study business, then it’s more like you are working in corporate functions, in sales and marketing and consultant, and then you actually go back to university.
While I finished then my study, I had a) a great network, I had b) a great understanding of the culture on how SAP works. And again, the start into the real life into my real job was much easier. SAP knew me, I knew the company, and the likelihood that it fits, it’s of course much better when you’re just starting without any knowledge about a company just fresh from the university, and so we brought this concept now also to other countries in the world, and a lot of great talents from all over the world are working now in top positions of SAP. We have a pretty young leadership team and that is, I guess, also a benefit of the vocational programs we are wanting.”
