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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday December 04 2018, @03:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the portents-of-future-ecma-script dept.

The Enterprises Project writes about how the demand for several very specific, established skills, including COBOL, is increasing as boomers retire, taking their knowledge with them. Part of the skill gap between the old and the new is familiarity with the work flow and business processes.

Baby Boomers are retiring and taking with them the skills to run legacy technologies upon which organizations still (amazingly) rely – from AS/400 wrangling to COBOL development. That leaves many CIOs in a tight spot, trying to fill roles that not only require specialized knowledge no longer being taught but that most IT professionals agree also have limited long-term prospects. "Specific skill sets associated with mainframes, DB2 and Oracle, for example, are complex and require years of training, and can be challenging to find in young talent," says Graig Paglieri, president of Randstad Technologies.

Apparently, COBOL is still in use in 9 percent of businesses, mainly in finance and government. And so the demand for COBOL is gradually growing. If one has interest to pick up that plus one or more of the other legacy technologies, on top of something newer and trendier, there should be a possibility to clean up before the last of these jobs moves to India.

Earlier on SN:
Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89 (2017)
Banks Should Let Ancient Programming Language COBOL Die (2017)
Honesty in Employment Ads (2016)
3 Open Source Projects for Modern COBOL Development (2015)


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 04 2018, @07:23PM (#769710) Journal

    I would agree with that. I am just countering the, perhaps straw-man, manager who thinks that anyone can instantly pick up ten years of know how in a few months.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:50PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Tuesday December 04 2018, @09:50PM (#769776) Homepage Journal

    Oh shit no. Experience is most definitely time-on-job dependent, though limited by the potential of the individual to learn it. There are no shortcuts, just faster runners.

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