Timothy Sipples wrote:
Wow. Guess I've got two "great mentor" candidates. :-)
Steve Comstock writes:
ROTFL!
Dream on! Most the companies I see today are
1. Trying to move off the mainframe
2. Trying to outsource their IT staff
3. Not spending any (or much) money on training.
You live in a dream world. I wish it were not so.
Those of us in the z/OS training world are dying a
[not so] slow death here.
So wouldn't it make sense to have more people to train?
Huh? How does that follow?
Where do trainees
come from?
What do you mean? Companies who want to train their
existing staff or new hires or people moving into
IT from other parts of the company. It's not
happening.
My market view happens to differ 180 degrees from yours, but
we're on the same side here, aren't we?
Maybe, but not on the same team. You get a paycheck
twice a month, regardless of what you do, including
vactions, sick leave, meetings, goofing off, etc.
No one held a gun to my head to tell me to be
self-employed, but we have a different motivation,
by definition.
For those companies trying to "move off the mainframe," what they really
mean is they're trying to move off inflexible applications -- maybe
inflexible IT staff thinking, too -- that are not meeting business needs,
regardless of platform.
_Maybe_ that's what they mean. But it looks to me like
they just want to get costs down for the near term
so they can get their quarterly bonus. [Management,
I'm talking about, of course.] [And, of course, there
are some exceptions, but not many.]
Who can blame them? I recommend including college
interns in your efforts to modernize applications.
Excuse me? I know I need to continually update my
curriculum, but I cannot pay any interns, and no
young college student is interested in learning
mainframe skills. The University of Colorado (or
was it Colorado State University? help me out here
Howard or Paul) offers a degree in computer gaming,
and they are dropping their degree program in
IT itself: enrollments too low.
I'm hoping you have classes to offer on WebSphere Application Server for
z/OS, WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS, CICS 3.1 Web Services, WebSphere
Developer for zSeries, WebSphere Portal for z/OS, WebSphere Business
Integration Server Foundation for z/OS (and WebSphere Process Server for
z/OS), WebSphere HATS, Linux under z/VM, and many of the other new
middleware products, especially if those classes are focused on helping
companies modernize and integrate mainframe applications using SOA
principles. If so, excellent. I am seeing particularly strong training
demand in those areas.
Yeah, that's nice. We offer CICS Web stuff, and we are
writing courses for WS4z; there's only two of us
writing materials, and there's a lot of learning curve.
In the past several years we have added courses in Java,
XML, z/OS UNIX, and I've updated all the classic courses
to reflect the latest Assembler, compilers, DB2, etc.
We're working hard, trying to work smart, and trying to
keep up (or get ahead).
I have had 28 billable days all year, my colleague a
few more. There is nothing else on the books right now
- forever. Well, that gives me lots of time to write
new courses.
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
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