There is a job opening for a GS-10 ($49397-$64213 plus overtime) for a Production Control, JOB Scheduling/JCL/TSO/ISPF and plenty of batch work. Before you snicker give me a chance to give some food for thought. Working for the US Federal Government may not be your idea of a job but you may change your mind reading below.
Let us say you are out of work SYSPROG, in your 50s, and heading to leave middle age. FACT: if you work for Uncle Sam all you need is 5 years and reach the age of 62 to retire. Sure the pension is not so great but during your employment you are covered by a GREAT health plan and you get to carry it into retirement at the same cost. Plus when you die, your spouse gets to keep it until he/she dies. There is no need for Medicare Part D for you get a prescription drugs in each plan. You get the 401K plus a small pension. OK, give you some real numbers. If you are ex-SYSPROG, then you could be a GS-10 Step 10. You can contribute $20K per year (before taxes) to your 401K, OPM kicks in 5% of your salary match, then remember you can do $5000 to your own IRA. In 5 years you have about $140K plus the earnings in the 401K and a small pension of 1% high 3 years salary x 5 years. Say you had served 4 years in the service, you can buy in for 4 more years at a cheap price and now you will have 9 years and not quite. Say we figure the high 3 salary as $70K you'd get $3,500 per year for the 5 years served or $6,300 for 9 years. This is more than enough to pay your Health Plan cost and have a bit left over. You'd be getting Social Security besides. You also have Life Insurance and it is reasonable. Hopefully you have those big 401K's, stock options, etc, from the companies that might have outsourced your jobs. Those with maybe prior government time, a few years in when you jumped out for the big bucks of the private world, would get a higher pension. The killer idea is that once in the government or back in the government you could compete for higher jobs a whole bunch easier. Also if you are now inside the government and die of the stress caused by your private job, your spouse automatically gets survivors rights and health care for the rest of their lives. Look out on www.usajobs.opm.gov and look for the Office of Personnel Management. The job is a GS-10 Computer Assistant (no snickering about the job title, the pay is the same as a GS-10 Computer whomever). Vacancy announcement 06-090-SMO. This is open to all sources, no previous government time required. Also in the application or resume, this is not like the private sector where you keep it to one page. US Gov't says the thicker the better. Spell out everything and if the announcement mentions, say RACF, then you say RACF. If you had ACF2, your say ACF2 (a RACF equivalent). If the HR folks want RACF and you say ACF2, no good. The position is with zSeries, z/OS, Parallel Sysplex, CICS/ADABAS, TSO/ISPF, using Tivoli Workload Scheduler. If you know Control-M, that is OK or any other package. Even if you do not know the package, you know the concepts. Remember this is a hands-on so if you were the SYSPROG who installed the package, you need to say you know how to actually schedule things because you probably trained the PCS staff. This is not assumed by the evaluators who might not have been SYSPROGs. As an aside, OPM is a fun place to work and much better than most other US Government agencies. So look at the long term view and maybe this is right for you. Jim Marshall ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
