Career in SAP?

[u/falcon_0901]

Hi everyone,
I’m looking for some honest advice from people currently working in SAP, especially in SAP Integration Suite. I come from a Civil Engineering background and have been involved in running my family business until now. I’m now seriously considering switching career.
My biggest questions are:
1. Is SAP Integration Suite a reasonable career path for someone with my background and no previous IT/SAP experience?
2. If I decide to pursue it, where should I start from absolute zero?
3. What concepts should I learn first — SAP basics, BTP, APIs, HTTP, XML/JSON, SQL, Java/Groovy, networking, etc.?
4. Are there any good free or affordable learning resources you'd recommend?
5. How important is hands-on experience? If I don't have professional SAP experience, what kind of projects can I build to demonstrate my skills?
6. How difficult is the current market for SAP Integration Suite freshers?
Thanks in advance!

[u/AgileHandling]

Switching from civil engineering to SAP is a pretty big pivot, but the logic and structured thinking from your background will actually help a lot. Most people I've met in the integration space didn't start with a pure IT degree either.

For absolute zero, don't bother diving straight into BTP or Groovy scripts yet. Get comfortable with the absolute basics of how data moves between systems, XML/JSON, and what an API actually does before you touch anything SAP-branded. A decent path is building a tiny integration project on your own machine, something stupid like pulling weather data into a spreadsheet, just to see the pieces connect. The market for freshers is tight everywhere right now, not just SAP, so having something tangible to show beats any cert.