>So why are there so mainframe types unemployed? I don't think that's particularly the case, at least relative to the IT labor market as a whole. The entire IT labor market (speaking in U.S. terms here) is in a sustained funk, so that affects everybody.
Mainframe-related employment tends to be relatively stable even with capacity growth. It certainly doesn't increase linearly. That said, employment does increase *some* with growth (at some point), so growth is obviously quite good to hear about and bodes well for the whole community. There's also a predicted wave of retirements, so again that's good news for those in the market or about to enter. Projections are that U.S. IT employment will basically "never" recover to those late 1990s heyday levels. Also, some general IT labor is shifting to lower wage countries throughout the IT industry. I observe that mainframe-related IT talent tends to be somewhat less susceptible to out-of-country migration, but there is still some impact. Mainframe growth should positively affect labor areas such as mainframe R&D, and that's at IBM and at other companies in related businesses. That's another avenue of potential employment. That's it in a nutshell, really, in my personal opinion. But I'm not a labor economist. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific 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
