Timothy Sipples wrote:
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.
My sense of urgency is measured in weeks, not years.
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.
The last statement was true, once upon a time. Now, it seems,
very few companies do any training, except for "soft skills".
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'm happy to teach in China working with an interpreter.
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. :-)
Sometimes ya' simply guess wrong. I put my energies into
developing courses for supporting the Web on the mainframe:
z/OS UNIX (3 courses)
X/HTML on z/OS
To be announced next week: WebSphere Developer for zSeries
But the prospects I talk to are not moving that direction.
And the IBM sales reps aren't talking that direction.
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.
Well, there may be some training at the vendor's sites. And if
anyone does self-training its the vendors.
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.
Again, happy to go there. I speak a little English, some German,
a bit of Spanish, and some Japanese. But no Chinese nor Indian
languages nor Eastern European languages. Lately I've done
some work in Denmark and Sweden but everyone there speaks English
and the courses are conducted in English.
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.
Need any training?
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.
Urgency must be relative. You don't have to generate your
salary in the next two months, I would wager. I've traveled
halfway around the world to do training, some of it at IBM's
request (Kuwait, Denmark) some at my own initiative (Ireland,
Singapore). Love it. Enjoy the experience while you're there.
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
http://www.trainersfriend.com
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