Re: The Greying of COMMON

At 05:40 PM 10/1/97 -0400, you wrote:
>                                Open letter to Common.
>                                           Subject: 
>
>                                     The Greying of COMMON.    
>

<big snip>


John,

I was one of the speakers who spoke up about the lack of AS/400 education
outlets.  In this piece you have really nailed the issue.  There will be no
new blood if we (the grey-hairs and no-hairs) don't make the effort to
educate and train new blood.  I would love to see COMMON lead that effort,
but alas, COMMON has a number of organizational issues to deal with, and I'm
not optomistic that they can get anything off of the ground soon enough to
make a difference.  

So,... In Seattle I am taking a more guerilla-istic approach.  Our Local
User Group will be building a program in concert with local Vocational
Schools and Community Colleges to train AS/400 programmers.  We are going to
recruit students (easy), hire and train instructors (User Group members will
also donate time), and solicit corporate financial support (given the
corporate costs of talent searches, I'm getting very positive feedback from
HR departments on this).  It is my intention to put together a program
before year end that can graduate 20-30 qualified AS/400 programmers the
first year, and each year after.

BTW, IBM's P.I.E program looks _very_ promising, especially given that they
are developing a curriculum, but we will not be dependent on them for our
success.

If you are involved with a Local User Group, I encourage you to start a
similar effort (If you want to compare notes, drop me an email and I'll keep
you updated as to our progress).  Maybe, in time, COMMON will be able to
lend it's considerable resources to this effort, but in the meantime I
beleive that it is vital that someone get the ball rolling.  

As Local User Groups, we are probably in the best position to start this off. 

jte
 

*************************************************
* John Earl             Lighthouse Software Inc.*
* johnearl@lns400.com   8514 71st NW            *
* 206.858.7388          Gig Harbor, WA 98335    *
*************************************************

And now a little Spam Bait for the 
automatic mail readers:

Chairman Reed Hundt:            rhundt@fcc.gov
Commissioner James Quello:      jquello@fcc.gov
Commissioner Susan Ness:        sness@fcc.gov
Commissioner Rachelle Chong:    rchong@fcc.gov

(Feel free to copy this text)

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