TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

It's Now Cool to Master the Mainframe

Salvatore Salamone | Date: 04-23-10 | Comments

IBM is using an annual educational contest to help develop a new crop of developers and IT managers with mainframe skills. Such skills are expected to be in demand in the future as mainframe use expands, thanks to Linux support and the forthcoming retirement of the baby boomers who are currently managing the world�s installed mainframe base.

Think the IT jobs market is stagnant with the tough economy?

A quick search of Monster.com this month turned up 935 mainframe job listings for developers, project managers and administrators with some combination of COBOL, DB2, CICS and JCL skills.

This is just another indication that the mainframe market continues to remain vibrant. In fact, on April 13, IBM opened a new $30 million, 56,000-square-foot facility in New York where new Power and System z mainframe systems will be manufactured.

IBM System z mainframe (Source: IBM)

Demand for new systems is being driven by a several factors.

Large organizations in financial services, insurance, retail and other industries, as well as many state governments, run their core applications on mainframes. There are greater demands being placed on these systems (especially in countries like Brazil, China and Russia). As more users seek to conduct business online and via mobile devices, systems must scale to meet new demands.

Also driving interest in the market, IBM has made the mainframe more useful. Ten years ago, IBM added Linux support to its System z mainframes. This gives System z users great flexibility and allows them to consolidate a variety of workloads. A typical use of Linux on a System z is to run, for example, a transaction processing application on the zSeries/Operating System (z/OS) and Web services applications on Linux side-by-side on the same machine.

Where Are the New Managers?

Unfortunately, many IT professionals lack mainframe programming and administration skills. But is it worth learning theses skills now?

Definitely, yes. A large percentage of the people who work on mainframes are approaching retirement age. One number frequently cited since about 2005 is that about 80 percent of the people who support mainframe operations are 50 years old or older. That puts this group at about 55 years old now. So in the next five to 10 years, many organizations anticipate large-scale retirements from this part of their staff.

Recognizing this, IBM launched an educational program five years ago that uses a contest with cool prizes to introduce students to the mainframe.

The Master the Mainframe contest has three stages. In each stage, the challenges get progressively harder and the prizes get larger.

Part one is designed to get students comfortable with navigating the mainframe user interface, as well as introducing them to some basic mainframe concepts. The first 1,000 students to complete this section 100 percent correctly received custom Master the Mainframe T-shirts.

Part two gives students some practical experience working on a mainframe. The students must perform extensive systems programming (advanced commands, system security and advanced system navigation) and application developing (C, JAVA, COBOL, assembler and REXX) tasks. All students who completed part two 100 percent correctly could add their resumes to the Student Opportunity System database, a recruiting tool accessible to all of IBM's clients and business partners. Additionally, the first 60 students who completed this section 100 percent correctly received a $100 prepaid debit card and a certificate from IBM.

Part three of the contest exposes students to real-world challenges. The five students who completed the most tasks in this phase got to choose between a Samsung 22-inch LCD HDTV and a Lenovo S10-2 netbook computer. In addition, top winners got a two-day expenses-paid trip to the IBM mainframe lab in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

About 3,000 students participated in this year�s contest. Some of the students were experienced IT pros who were taking college courses to expand their skills. About a third of the participants this year were from high schools (one of the five top finishers, in fact, is a high school student). And one high school�Ocoee High School in Florida�had 130 kids register for the contest, among which 99 completed stage one, and 30 got through stage two (no word on how many completed stage three).

Student contestants from Ocoee High School (Source: Ocoee High School and IBM)

Past contest winners have gotten jobs in companies including Morgan Stanley, BMO Financial and Progressive Insurance. And about a dozen past participants have gotten jobs with IBM. The complete list of winners can be found here.