Mainframes aren’t going away. Here are some thoughts on how to find and help the next generation of mainframe talent in your company.
Mainframes aren’t going anywhere. They will continue to serve as the technological backbone of large organizations for years to come. However, there is a shortage of new talent entering the workforce who are trained to operate and write programs for mainframes. As experienced mainframe programmers retire or move into management roles, companies are vying to recruit enough new talent to fill all the open positions.
There is, however, no looming mainframe apocalypse where the mainframe systems of the world will come to a screeching halt when the last of the baby boomers retire. Like any field, as the talent pool shrinks and the demand rises, salaries for good mainframe technicians and programmers will go up, enticing more technical talent into the field.
Companies of all sorts have been lamenting the difficulties of hiring enough engineering and technical talent for years. Companies seeking to hire mainframe programmers are not unique in this struggle. Mainframes, however, get singled out because of the perception that they are legacy devices, holding out past their useful life span. This perception exists mostly because mainframes have been around the longest. However, organizations that run on mainframes still benefit greatly from the computational and processing power they provide. And newer mainframes offer companies greater opportunities for IT departments.
Technical skills are valuable because they are rare. Tech companies of all sorts pay hefty premiums to hire new talent from top schools. However, companies can do a lot to grow their own talent through internships, entry level trainee positions, cross-training employees from other departments, aggressive recruiting, and by offering generous salaries for the most valuable positions.
Mainframes are actually well suited for an environment where the talent pool is so limited. One of the advantages of mainframes is that you are able to do more with fewer people. Operating a mainframe takes far fewer system administrators than a data center with similar capabilities. Therefore, rather than needing a large department of smart employees to run your IT operations, you can manage it with a much smaller team.
The skills needed to run a mainframe are quite diverse. Companies with mainframes typically need COBOL programmers (unless they’re mostly running Linux applications), Java and Linux developers, system administrators with CICS and z/OS skills, and operations staff to take care of database administration, hardware, and facilities. These are all very technical skills, but experienced technologists and programmers from other field are able to learn and adopt the mainframe technology with proper training.
One of the most extreme shortages is in US based programmers with experience in writing and maintaining COBOL based programs. However, experienced programmers are able to learn and adopt new programming languages far more easily than young programmers. Therefore, another recruiting pool that companies should seek is with experienced programmers writing enterprise applications in other languages like Java.
There are fads in computing as in most pursuits. Current trends are drawing many young developers to programming web and iOS applications. Helping young programmers get interested once again in developing for mainframes will be a challenge for the entire industry, but there are many recruiters actively working on finding talent for companies — the Mainframe Recruiters LinkedIn Group has nearly 2,500 members, for example.
And of course, newer mainframe programmers and sysadmins can also be immensely helped by software which sits on top of the mainframe and makes interacting with and controlling systems much easier to learn and to stay on top of. It’s what we do at ASPG – which is why we know that our range of software can do things like make encryption less of a challenge to implement, allow for easier querying of IBM’s RACF utility, and much more.
