BTP, CAP & RAP: The New SAP Developer Profile Hiring Managers Must Understand
Modern SAP development looks nothing like classical ABAP. What to screen for, and where these consultants actually come from.
If your screening rubric still leads with 'years of classical ABAP', you're filtering out the developers SAP itself is now building around. BTP, CAP and RAP demand a different profile — one closer to a full-stack cloud engineer than a traditional ABAPer.
What to screen for: comfort with Git-based workflows, Node.js or Java in the CAP context, CDS modelling, OData v4, and a working understanding of CI/CD on BTP. Bonus: exposure to event-driven patterns via Event Mesh, and any genuine Kyma or Kubernetes time.
Where these people come from: a meaningful share are mid-career ABAPers who self-retrained during 2022–2024. Others are full-stack JavaScript or Java engineers who joined SAP ecosystems via BTP and never touched classical ABAP. Both work — but the interview should look very different from a 2018 ABAP screen.
Red flag we see often: candidates who list BTP on their CV but have only consumed standard iFlows. Ask them to walk through a CAP service they built end-to-end, including deployment. The answer separates real practitioners from training-course tourists.
