Solving the Shrinking Mainframe Workforce Problem
Fogwill. H. (2016)
Western Governors University
WGU Student# 000519534
Solving the Shrinking Mainframe Workforce Problem
The impact of the rapidly shrinking mainframe workforce should be a national concern, since it has the potential to impact every aspect of one’s daily life. Most people are oblivious to the amount of time their daily activities interact with applications running on mainframes. Every financial transaction conducted has a high probability of using mainframe systems. Every stock trade, insurance company interaction, grocery checkout, health care system, or gas station transaction requires an application, potentially written in COBOL, or Assembler, running on mainframes (King, …show more content…
Students would complete this degree with a knowledge in developing COBOL applications, knowledge in mainframe data sources like VSAM, and BDAM systems, and fundamentals of the operational environment of mainframe systems. This made sense fifteen, or twenty years ago because little other enterprise systems were available, and the demand for mainframe skills were enormous. The marketplace changed tremendously, and presently we have Linux systems, Windows Server, cloud deployments, clustering servers, and dozens of programming languages. Colleges are now trying to cover a very broad spectrum of technologies, and with this broad brush there is no place to include mainframe technologies. The consequence are graduates might have skills in open source type languages, and do not have the required skills to step into the demanding environment mainframe enterprises will put on them. IBM identified this shortage, and started to address this workforce shortage, and lack of tertiary education with colleges by creating a program called the Academic Initiative (Academic Initiative Program). The goal of this initiative is to help educational institutions understand the needs companies have for skilled mainframe technicians, and to help companies find colleges with mainframe programs ensuring graduates gets employed after they complete their …show more content…
Mainframes run on proprietary hardware, and proprietary software made available by IBM. These components are extremely expensive, and very few organizations can afford this technology. Even colleges who received deep discounts for this technology discontinued using it because the expense became too high. Consequently, this contributed to colleges not teaching this technology anymore. Multiple actions need to be implemented to alleviate this expense to get younger people exposed to mainframe environments. The hardware requirement can be overcome by using mainframe architecture emulators running on regular Linux, or Windows pc’s. One such emulator is available today by a company called Hercules. IBM does not license their operating system on this platform, and as a result nobody can really run anything on Hercules except the very early 1960’s version of the operating system. This will provide very little benefit to learning the environment because it changed tremendously over the last 50 years. IBM should make available methods to make the mainframe operating system available for non-commercial use under these emulated hardware environments for newcomers to gain valuable exposure to this platform.
Solving this problem require educational institutions to start teaching mainframe skills, applications need to be modernized, and IBM need to make access to mainframe technologies much easier. Companies
Fogwill. H. (2016)
Western Governors University
WGU Student# 000519534
Solving the Shrinking Mainframe Workforce Problem
The impact of the rapidly shrinking mainframe workforce should be a national concern, since it has the potential to impact every aspect of one’s daily life. Most people are oblivious to the amount of time their daily activities interact with applications running on mainframes. Every financial transaction conducted has a high probability of using mainframe systems. Every stock trade, insurance company interaction, grocery checkout, health care system, or gas station transaction requires an application, potentially written in COBOL, or Assembler, running on mainframes (King, …show more content…
Students would complete this degree with a knowledge in developing COBOL applications, knowledge in mainframe data sources like VSAM, and BDAM systems, and fundamentals of the operational environment of mainframe systems. This made sense fifteen, or twenty years ago because little other enterprise systems were available, and the demand for mainframe skills were enormous. The marketplace changed tremendously, and presently we have Linux systems, Windows Server, cloud deployments, clustering servers, and dozens of programming languages. Colleges are now trying to cover a very broad spectrum of technologies, and with this broad brush there is no place to include mainframe technologies. The consequence are graduates might have skills in open source type languages, and do not have the required skills to step into the demanding environment mainframe enterprises will put on them. IBM identified this shortage, and started to address this workforce shortage, and lack of tertiary education with colleges by creating a program called the Academic Initiative (Academic Initiative Program). The goal of this initiative is to help educational institutions understand the needs companies have for skilled mainframe technicians, and to help companies find colleges with mainframe programs ensuring graduates gets employed after they complete their …show more content…
Mainframes run on proprietary hardware, and proprietary software made available by IBM. These components are extremely expensive, and very few organizations can afford this technology. Even colleges who received deep discounts for this technology discontinued using it because the expense became too high. Consequently, this contributed to colleges not teaching this technology anymore. Multiple actions need to be implemented to alleviate this expense to get younger people exposed to mainframe environments. The hardware requirement can be overcome by using mainframe architecture emulators running on regular Linux, or Windows pc’s. One such emulator is available today by a company called Hercules. IBM does not license their operating system on this platform, and as a result nobody can really run anything on Hercules except the very early 1960’s version of the operating system. This will provide very little benefit to learning the environment because it changed tremendously over the last 50 years. IBM should make available methods to make the mainframe operating system available for non-commercial use under these emulated hardware environments for newcomers to gain valuable exposure to this platform.
Solving this problem require educational institutions to start teaching mainframe skills, applications need to be modernized, and IBM need to make access to mainframe technologies much easier. Companies