How to advance my learning as an Operator

Hi everyone, 
 
Due to my being unemployed since Jan. 2003, I took a temp operators position at 
one of the largest Pharmaceutical company's in the world, shift work, 3 days a 
week, 12.5 hours per shift with an alternating Sunday, fortunately days. There 
are 15 AS/400's, mainframe, Win 2k, and Unix. Primary responsibilities are 
AS/400. The company is constantly buying up competitors and much of the 
Production and Development work is intergration. My work involves monitoring 
job completions via a checklist, tape backups via BRMS, checking for serious 
job halt messages and escalating. Takes up about 40-50% of my time. They are 
all on V5.2, some machines have websphere, MQSeries, advanced Java, DataMirror. 
The apps all home grown, not one package. Standard third party tools for 
security, bar codes, etc...The problem is what can I focus on learning that 
will add to my knowledge and future marketability as the programmer that I was, 
or as a Senior Systems Admin that I would prefer to be over this spot? I would 
like to learn about Websphere but I am not sure how much I can do without a 
client machine. They are starting a Websphere project very shortly. I have a PC 
that is connected to all the systems via client access. Is this something that 
I can set up by myself? I probably will need to ask permission.  I think that 
focusing on Java might be the easiest and least detectable. But I don't think I 
can go and create my own library. Even compiling a program in some dead library 
would not work. They are very security concious, but I am prepared to take a 
mild risk.
 
I am just looking for any ideas. I haven't been able to come up with much yet.
 
Any ideas are appreciated, 
Rob


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