RE: Recommendations for a newcomer?

The answer depends on your current skill-set, years-to-retirement, geographic location of where you will reside next year, etc.

The obvious answer is to look at the job web-sites like Craigslist, Monster, DICE, etc for your geo location.

Are there dozens of RPG or COBOL listings? If yes, consider learning these tools. More than likely there are few in your area.

If you have no computer background, pick up skills where the jobs are (C#, Java, SQL, SAP, etc) and where public education is available (not RPG and not COBOL).

If you have all the popular skills, why would you look at landing a job with legacy software? Only makes sense if you are within 5 or 10 years of retirement.

Most Iseries shops are transitioning AWAY from RPG and COBOL, although it may take 5 or 10 years to arrive. Many are moving to ERP or other packages such as JDE or SAP. None of these platforms run RPG or COBOL in their current flagship versions.

And where would you pick up the skills? There are no community colleges that teach RPG or COBOL or CL anymore (maybe in India??)

No platform is uncool by itself, only in the context that there is limited earning ability associated with it.



-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Clay B Carley
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 10:06 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Recommendations for a newcomer?

Being new to midrange systems, I'm attempting to pick up skills that
will be useful for me in the future, in hopes to get a job working with
them. Reading articles that say things like COBOL is uncool, and RPG is
worse isn't really giving me hope for a future working with a midrange
system though.

Is it going to be worth my time to learn things like CL, COBOL, and RPG
now? Or are they fading away? It would be pretty sad to finally become
proficient with these languages, only to find out that they are dead and
replaced with <blah> instead.

What would you recommend a newcomer focus on (aside from system operations)?

Reading Rob's message from last week regarding "20 years of experience,
versus one year of experience repeated 20 times" looks like a pretty
good starting place I suppose. I'm really trying to look at where we're
going to be in the years to come, not necessarily tomorrow.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Clay Carley