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The Mainframe IT Skill is Here
The Un-graying of The System Programmer
David Meck
The title for this short article is derived from a BOF (Birds Of a Feather) session at the August
2002 SHARE meeting in San Francisco. The focus of the BOF was concern over an impending
skills shortage of IT workers for the IBM eServer. The title of that BOF was “The
Graying of the System Programmer.” Marist College, engaged in Joint Studies with the IBM Corporation http://www.marist.edu/registrar/catalog03/general.html#ibm, is participating in a program to provide education to help in the “un-graying” process.
Marist College is offering online z/OS and zSeries related education. The program is backed by a z/OS 1.4
operating system running as a z/VM guest on a z900 at Marist College. Marist is not the only institute of higher
education involved in this z/OS education effort. Courses are being offered at other institutions around the
world to educate new programmers with z/OS skills. The z/OS system at Marist is available for other colleges
and universities for student exercises in UNIX, DB2, CICS, Java, JCL, and zSeries Assembly Language.
See the IBM Scholar’s Program web site for colleges near your place of business or home and for more
information at
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/info/university/
One objective of the scholar’s program is to foster corporate and collegiate partnerships in the
offering of needed z/OS related education and associated internships.
Dying the gray heads or hairless domes  of IT workers will not ameliorate the skills loss problem.
What is needed is fresh young blood to look to careers working with the mainframe. Attitudes about the mainframe being a dinosaur need to
be changed. There are definitely hurdles that need to be cleared for resolution of this impending crisis: here are a few based on comments voiced at the BOF:
- Don’t see mainframes as sexy or interesting.
- Systems programmers) are hard to come by.
- The skill shortage is not coming, it is already here.
- Colleges and Universities are not offering z/OS related courses.
Is the mainframe really dead? Some of my students don’t think so, as they are now embarking on new careers in IBM. Is it complex? Yes it is, but that is what speaks of the elegance of the operating system and hardware. I think the pairing of the mainframe hardware and operating system is perhaps the most complex system made by man. The cosmos is complex, but it is beautiful in its complexity and man did not make it. I know I sound like a real geek. I’ve been inside the code and taught the internals and it is like a big puzzle, which can be put together and enjoyed. I better stop this line of effusive adoration before any one feels ill. Let’s take a look at some recent and not so recent press clips.
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