May 06, 2002, 12:00 AM — Experts are predicting a mainframe skills shortage in five years' time
as aging IT professionals begin retiring in large numbers. However,
while speakers at the American Federation of Computer Operations
Management conference last week claim that by 2007 aging IT
professionals will retire and companies will be clamoring for those
skills, Australian IT managers are divided on the subject.
Organizer of the 2002 Australian IT User Groups' Open Day in March and
VTR Consulting managing director Vincent Teubler, said, "Unless someone
sets up a Jurassic Park to look after the dear old (mainframe)
dinosaurs, there will be a shortage in a few years."
"Just remember that dinosaurs roamed the earth for a long time before
man was on the scene -- well over 100 million years. Mainframe
technologies were around before many of the people currently in the IT
market were even born and will likely still be around when most die of
natural or unnatural causes," Teubler said.
A Meta Group survey found more than 90 percent of 300 companies that
have mainframe staff had "zero strategy" for dealing with the
diminishing pool of skilled mainframe workers.
Meta Group estimates that 55 percent of IT workers with mainframe
experience are more than 50 years old.
Teubler said while IBM has traditionally dominated the mainframe
market, demand today is continuing for skills in Cobol, PL/I, RPG and
CICS.
"In Australia, these skills are typically found in the more experienced
50 years- plus IT professionals or the migrant population, for example,
large quantities of Cobol code were sent to India during the Y2K
implementation in order to meet skills in demand," he said.
"With the recent demise of Ansett (Australia Ltd.) and downsizing
requirements within some large organizations, we have seen an increase
in IT professionals on the market, seeking work within the mainframe
environments."
Teubler said large organizations, which have large transaction
processing requirements -- like banks, airlines and utilities -- still
rely heavily on mainframe technologies. And he suggests until a
technology is delivered that provides the same processing power,
scalability and reliability, there will continue to be a demand for IT
professionals who possess mainframe development, support and
operational skills.
"With more than A$2 trillion worth of mainframe applications in place
with their centralized architecture, it is expected they are here to
stay and may just be the wave of the future," Teubler said.
However, Australian Computer Society chief executive officer Dennis
Furini, said the mainframe skills shortage is still 10 years away.
"Sure those with these skills are in their forties or fifties; there
isn't big demand now because of the market downturn, but new systems
being developed tend to go into Unix and distributed platforms," he
said.
Furini said companies will try to "Retain their in-house people with
those skills for the short term, but it will be a race between how soon
these people retire and how soon companies transition their legacy
systems to other platforms.
"I don't see any shortage of skills in the bread and butter
applications like CICS, DB2, MVS, but there are shortages in more
specialist areas like DOS/VSE, Huron and JESS III," Furini said.
An IT manager from a consulting company said he believes it is
currently a tight market for mainframe specialists aged 40 and over.
He said mainframes will be phased out if both reasonable running costs
cannot be maintained and replacement is feasible, it is simply a
business decision.
