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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)
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday December 05 2018, @04:58PM
In "the same job"? No. No single job tends to last that long anymore that isn't a CxO position and even they shift around.
At "the same firm"? Define your time range. I've seen a couple of places so far that had one or two people that have stayed in the firm and retired after 20-30 years because they are flexible, well known, and work well. They are valued as assets to the company because of their attitude as much as their abilities to master a skill set, and their ambitions match what the company has been looking for consistently. All three of those requirements need to be high, though, for that to work. And it's still not impossible for someone to get bumped off by a RIF or similar.
Perhaps it is more frequent than being a rock star or a star athelete. But you're also right that this is not something to be counted on - even for those who do it this has to be an objective that is worked for.
This sig for rent.