CEOs are frowning faces and wringing their hands about a growing skill vacuum that is silently spreading across IT. The void threatens to sink many successful businesses and small shops using mainframe.
A Crisis Is Brewing
Scores of mainframe jobs land on job portals every month. The market for talent is hot, but tech graduates are missing out the opportunity of having a well-paid career because of lack of skill.
So how are these jobs passing talents by? And is it safe to gather that the skill gap is accumulating particularly around mainframe? At Tech Field Day Experience at SHARE Kansas City 2024, we asked the delegates about this.
“It’s a lot more nuanced than that,” says Derek Britton, technology marketing specialist. “If you look at it from an organization-by-organization perspective, you’ll get a completely different answer from one organization as you will from another.”
There are many government departments where skill gap is growing steadily worse, says Cameron Seay, technology evangelist. “Ask the IRS or Social Security or the state of North Carolina. They can’t find anybody, and they need people. People are retiring every single day.”
With IT companies however, the responses are strictly based on their level of strategic enlightenment, says Britton. In other words, how well the company’s resources and requirements are aligned.
For example, some organizations that are good at it say they are very happy with their apprenticeship and training programs. Others say that the struggle to find mainframe skills is very real.
It’s partly on enterprises to up the ante in the skill search, Britton says. “Certain organizations that have not established that level of investment, rigor or management oversight have fallen behind on skills.”
The distress is growing among some small offices where mainframe talent is getting scarcer than it was a few years ago.
The Hidden Causes of Skill Gap
The reason is rooted in mainframe’s receding glory. Once a hot technology, these monolithic computers are outshone by cloud and distributed computing. Since the past decade, mainframe has only existed in the shadows quietly powering backend business processes.
But make no mistake. Mainframe is not going anywhere. “The mainframe environment and applications have outlasted anyone’s reasonable prediction of their tenure,” Britton notes. “Those challenges will exist, and they will come to pass at some point in many organizations because the systems are just more successful than anyone ever thought. They would be the microcosm of the skills discussion.”
Studies have linked low mainframe skills to shortage of successful training programs in enterprises. Many IT companies offer resources free training courses on mainframe to upskill them for mainframe operations, but the courses run only a few weeks, and do not nearly cover enough things.
Geoffrey Decker who has been a mainframe software developer for over a decade and now teaches mainframe courses to new graduates says that lack of premeditated learning outcomes is a huge obstacle for trainers.
“What I find hardest to get a basis of is what companies really need out of the education that I provide only in two semesters,” Decker says. “What I’d really like is some type of a survey to say this is what we need as companies.”
One big challenge is that everything that needs to be taught about mainframe to prepare workers for a career in mainframe is impossible to fit in a two-term curriculum. Companies need to identify that limitation and reform their training programs to correct this.
There is a lot to be familiar with – the programming languages, operating systems, virtualization, the lingos, which maybe a lot to absorb on the fly for a newcomer who has had little or no initiation on the subject.
But there is merit in skilling professionals with mainframe expertise. “Back in the UK, we have a need to grow what we call “pointy-headed techies” – real bits and bytes people because our customers come to us when things break,” says Mark Wilson, IT veteran.
An overwhelming amount of interest in modern and contemporary technologies is serving as an added distraction for professionals, deflecting them to other areas.
“The general world has moved on to the new and the cool,” says Jeremy Meiss, app developer and business analyst. “The general user moved past the command line.”
Addressing the Gap with Small Steps
Upskilling is a big part of remaining successful in IT, and workers naturally gravitate towards the latest technologies to boost their resume. But it’s worth remembering that having basic mainframe skills can be helpful for thriving even in those areas. After all, interaction with mainframe on the job, on any job, is unavoidable.
Of course there are workarounds like everything else in IT. PopUp Mainframe is a good example of that. PopUp Mainframe provides on-demand pop-up mainframe environments for testing and development – no skills required.
“But to my folks I say, learn the command line stuff first,” says Wilson. “Then to make your life easier, use all the UI stuff and get that done.”
Marian Newsome, cybersecurity specialist, proposes that changing the messaging around mainframe can help reduce the gap. “There are skill gaps even in the new and emerging tech. I think there is an image problem. Marketing saying mainframe is the backbone of what business runs off of, needs to happen.”
Skill accumulation has been slow in mainframe for another reason. “We create so much of a barrier to entry when we assume that everybody knows the lingo,” says Meiss.
IT is a highly niche field of work where there are more specialists than generalists. It’s fair to not assume that everybody knows everything.
The solution is clear. “We have to recklessly remove any barrier that helps to get someone to be successful,” says Meiss. “Part of that is to start reframing the conversation around why mainframe skills matter in the cloud era. We can then try and bridge this gap and explain how the newer DevOps cool things that we talk about and have been for the last 15 years, all relate to it.”
Preparing new talents for mainframe jobs would require offering them a safe space to learn first and foremost. An inclusive approach that cultivates IT skills holistically instead of isolating a relatively small field as an island of its own and denying its existence, is another way to help reshape the situation.
Britton believes that HR has a bigger role to play than most understand. At the people’s level, Human Resource can help foster a positive learning culture through certain policies and programs. Companies also need to be keen to invest in people, and look at reforming training programs when required. Doing these can help an entire generation of young professionals learn mainframe from ground up and seize job opportunities, thereby ending the problem of skill shortage.
Check out the full Tech Field Day Delegate Roundtable – Addressing the Mainframe Skills Gap – from Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Kansas City 2024 to learn more.
