he Mainframe Skills Gap: Closing It Without COBOL
About this episode
Vince Re discusses how cloud teams can manage mainframe integration without needing COBOL expertise.
What is the mainframe skills gap, and how can enterprises close it without hiring more COBOL programmers? VirtualZ Computing CTO Vince Re tackles one of the most pressing problems in enterprise IT: the COBOL, JCL, and REXX experts who keep IBM Z mainframes running are retiring faster than they can be replaced, and few new engineers are trained on those technologies. The mainframes still process core banking, insurance, and government workloads — but the people who understand them are aging out. Vince Re argues the fix isn't finding more mainframe specialists. It's making deep mainframe expertise optional for the integration layer, so the cloud-native and DevOps engineers enterprises already employ can work with mainframe data directly — without learning COBOL or REXX. In this episode of Skyward Data, the podcast from VirtualZ Computing: - What the mainframe skills gap is, why it's accelerating, and what it costs enterprises that don't plan for it - Why hiring against a shrinking COBOL and REXX talent pool is a losing strategy - How cloud and DevOps teams can own mainframe data integration using skills they already have - The economics of leveraging abundant cloud-native talent…
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