>I hope you've been reading this thread because this >is the real world I encounter. IBM seems to have no >sense of urgency over this, but I'm might close to >closing my doors after 30 years of being a self-employed >trainer and 7 years with IBM before that.
It's hard to predict the future precisely. If I had to guess, mainframe training demand will be increasing over the next several years at whatever pace mainframe professional retirements occur. The retirements haven't come as fast as predicted (fortunately), and they may be stretched out more than expected, but they will happen. Mainframe shops don't need as much labor per transaction as they used to -- there's a lot more automation, preconfiguration, etc. So there won't be one-for-one replacement (unless there's business growth). There's also going to be some competition among trainers as retiring mainframe professionals enter that market, perhaps part time and ad hoc. And most companies will try to train in-house to one degree or another. It's also hard to say what the geographic distribution will be like. I've joked about the fact that if you know the Chinese language and mainframes then you have a job guarantee, but I think it really is true. If you live in a smaller community then you might have to follow the jobs across state (or at least across county) lines. That's true of a lot of industries, though, so it's hardly unusual. I would imagine there's also going to be an increasing emphasis on new mainframe technologies as interest continues to grow: WebSphere Application Server, Web services, Linux, Java, etc. Which is not to say that everything else is going away -- far from it -- but the ratio could change. That's always true, though. In 1974 there was very little demand for DB2 training. :-) I think there's going to be increased demand for development-related training as software vendors try to bring more products to the mainframe. That'll be in J2EE and Linux areas, in particular, but not exclusively. There is some mainframe-related offshoring. I think other areas of IT are more likely to move overseas -- the average distributed system simply doesn't have as much business value, to be blunt, and a lot of people who work on such systems will find themselves offshored. But there will be some offshoring-related mainframe training needs in places like China (again), India, and Eastern Europe. I'm not exactly sure yet how IBM retirements will affect the supply of mainframe trainers and, thus, the training market. There are too many cross currents to get a good read. I believe IBM has announced that it's in a mainframe hiring mode, and that's been my personal observation, too. Re: IBM and a sense of urgency, the big reason I'm where I'm at this moment is because of a corporate sense of urgency. So, at least in my personal experience (and observation), yeah, we got that -- so much so that I'm roughly halfway around the world from home. - - - - - Timothy F. Sipples Consulting Enterprise Software Architect, z9/zSeries IBM Japan, Ltd. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
