It depends on your interests and background. PeopleSoft is an enterprise application with a lot of problems and I personally think it sucks. If you do not have programming experience, you might want to go with PeopleSoft because the learning curve is not as steep. However, you always need to think about the future. What if companies stop using PeopleSoft and move to a different software? Normally, I wouldnt wan't to make a specific software my career path. Also, you will be stuck in the ERP/Human Resources sector. Technologies evolve much faster and it would be wise to learn something that is generic and more fundamental to computing. However, if you learn to program ( with Java ), I expect you to learn the fundamentals  which  will enable you to solve problems , regardless of the domain of problem. You can move across different domains and even use different languages/toolsets as needed. Java is not the perfect language either. It is bloated. There is no such thing as a perfect language. Every language has some killer usecases. So, learn how to program ( java is good to start with, but I prefer something functional), and things will fall into place . Cheers :)