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As summer simmers down and my kids are back from camp, one of the lasting highlights is missives in the mail from 13-year-old Zev. His letters from Tamarack in Michigan usually take a week, but are worth waiting for: zany observations punctuated by junk food he’s managed to get hold of. Here’s one account of a trip he took:
Everyone was complaining about being hungry. And to make it worse, we had a bathroom break in front of a Subway and Dairy Queen. We protested and refused to get back on the bus until we got food (which the counselors were not too happy about). Some people took it seriously, but me and my friends made a joke out of it. As strangers walked by, we acted like we were lost and I sat next to the wall playing my harmonica.
(Yes, Zev took his harmonica to camp.)
The next letter recounted another bus trip out of camp.
I drank an entire bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper. (I was going to get Cherry Dr. Pepper, but it has 70 grams of sugar.) It was SO GOOD, and I also had half of my friend’s Pizza Pringles. So it helped when the bus failed to climb up this super-steep hill. We had to get out and climb up ourselves so the bus had less weight. Half of the kids started crying because they thought the bus was going to fall down the hill. And my friend Daniel threw up, which made five more people throw up. It was pretty crazy. We finally made it to the camp site. By then, everyone was pretty worn out. We had to unload all of our stuff and set up the tents. My friend and I played javelin with the tent poles and he won. ☹
In the best camp stories, something is on the brink of going horribly wrong. Which is precisely the state of career launch in America – with stakes that could not be higher for socioeconomic mobility and American higher education. So bear with me briefly while I introduce a topic I guarantee you’ll greet with about as much enthusiasm as Zev when, years ago, I first talked to him about going to camp.
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For over 30 years, large companies and organizations have run functions like finance, HR, supply chain, sales, business intelligence, and project management on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software like SAP and Oracle (formerly PeopleSoft). ERP evolved into the operating system of late capitalism; everything ran on it. As these systems covered so much digital ground, implementations were complex, often to disastrous effect. If you work in higher education, your first exposure to ERP might have been a PeopleSoft implementation that was years behind schedule, millions over budget and yielded a headline-grabbing lawsuit.
As the primary benefit was to tap a unified database of information from across the organization and connect to a single general ledger, ERPs were one-size-fits-all solutions, neither tailored to any specific industry nor sufficiently specialized to allow functions to be managed entirely in the system (or at least managed well). Because ERPs only captured a portion of workflow, the typical use case involved logging completed work in the ERP rather than carrying out the work from start to finish. For most professionals, engagement with the ERP was more about extracting data to analyze and manipulate outside the system than actually working on the platform.
With software’s shift to the cloud and the emergence of function-specific SaaS products like Salesforce (CRM/Sales), Workday (HR), and ServiceNow (IT), ERP now seems as antiquated as the epistolary tradition, albeit with less charm and fewer zany stories. Specialized SaaS platforms allow professionals to complete most or all of their work entirely in the software. How so? Because they’ve digitized virtually all possible workflow – or at least best practice workflow – for relevant business functions. These new platforms are rigid yet highly configurable digital reflections of the enterprise. And while SAP and Oracle have tried to respond with new modules, they’re limited from not being cloud-native, as well as not having the focus or function, industry, or workflow expertise to compete with specialized SaaS.
Why should we care? Because the decline and fall of ERP has already transformed the entry-level jobs colleges are ostensibly preparing students for.
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Back in ERP’s salad days, skills and experience with PeopleSoft or SAP were only found in job descriptions for IT positions: administering, configuring, or supporting the ERP itself. Those numbered thousands – not millions – of jobs accessible to new college graduates. Meanwhile, the finance, HR, supply chain, sales, business intelligence, and project management positions which involved interacting with ERP didn’t demand ERP experience or skills. Why would they? Because ERP’s functionality was limited, those roles didn’t involve living in the ERP, only visiting every now and then. So managers believed new hires could learn what they needed in order to use the system, then get on with the real work. This made millions of ERP-adjacent jobs perfect for college grads.
Today, thanks to digital transformation and the rise of specialized SaaS, nearly all good jobs are no longer adjacent; they live in these SaaS platforms full time. That’s millions – not thousands – of entry-level positions. And because specialized SaaS are industry- and function-specific, job descriptions increasingly demand not only platform skills – usually naming the specific SaaS platform – but also experience in the industry and/or function. Because these platforms aim to encompass 100% of workflow formerly done via ERP + Excel (or paper, or manually), hiring managers now want candidates who already understand the industry and/or function. Because if they don’t, they’ll be at sea the moment they start living in the platform.
In the spirit of selecting an example as enthralling as ERP, let’s talk about finance. Every organization of some scale has a finance function and either a CFO or controller responsible for accounting, reporting, and budgeting. 70% of CFOs report continuing to rely on Excel for budgeting and forecasting because ERPs lack the ability to do complete financial planning and analysis (FP&A) in the platform. That’s not ideal for two reasons: (1) reconciling data across disparate spreadsheets can be time consuming; and (2) Excel documents reflect a single point in time and require updating or rework in subsequent months. Hence the rush to specialized CFO SaaS platforms like OneStream – simpler and more affordable than the multiple ERP modules required for FP&A. But the bigger reason is that CFOs are being asked to add more value than simply closing the books and circulating reports. They’re increasingly instrumental in strategic planning and value creation discussions, often directly informing or influencing operations.
Imagine a global manufacturer experiencing sudden price hikes from suppliers. In ancient ERP times, the trend might not be spotted until after the monthly close – typically 2-3 weeks into the following month. Then the CFO (or realistically, a new college grad working as an analyst) would export data to Excel and run scenarios in order to come up with options so the unexpected cost increases don’t lead to a missed quarter. That’s probably another week or two. So there’s no plan of action for at least a month. In contrast, a SaaS platform like OneStream presents real-time data with company-wide reports by location, product, and business unit, alerting the CFO (i.e., a new college grad working as an analyst) the same day. Then – again with real-time data – OneStream runs rolling forecasts across various scenarios and produces a recommendation – all in the same day. The result is an immediate remediation plan, not a month-long delay that could jeopardize the quarter and the CFO’s job. Hence OneStream’s rapid growth and successful IPO last month.
When the aforementioned work was done by extracting data from SAP then manipulating it in Excel, few finance departments bothered listing that detailed workflow in job descriptions, let alone insisted on SAP skills or experience. But now, because the work is increasingly happening entirely in specialized SaaS platforms like OneStream, finance is listing OneStream skills and finance experience in job descriptions.
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We’re seeing the same pattern repeating across the enterprise and impacting millions of jobs, primarily in the private sector; the public sector is still catching up on ERP. The consequences couldn’t be more dire for young people looking for a first good full-time position. Jobs that were once entry-level – jobs that didn’t demand prior skills or experience in a specific industry or with a particular job function, let alone a specific SaaS platform – are simply no longer accessible for college grads or even candidates with graduate or professional degrees.
Specialty SaaS’s eclipse of ERP is driving the experience inflation afflicting millions of new and recent grads. A LinkedIn study found that for entry-level positions with a software component, 60% requested years of prior experience. For most good entry-level jobs, career launchers need to show they’ve pretty much already done the job. Which puts the mockers on the whole entry-level job thing. Which means colleges urgently need to pay attention to a topic they’re constitutionally set up to avoid and ignore.
Except colleges can’t really claim ignorance on ERP. Like governments, they depend on them to operate every day. Although colleges are well ahead on leveraging powerful SaaS platforms like Salesforce (CRM) and JAGGAER (procurement) and tapping trusted higher education-focused service providers like Cloud for Good and RiseNow to implement these platforms and make them really work.
As colleges undergo this transition, they’d do well to think about the connection to their many recent graduates who invested and borrowed a great deal in order to get a good first job, but are now more lost than Zev outside the Subway/DQ.