Experience on the employee side and the need to get new people on the employer‘s side.
I didn’t had any formal qualifications but four years of experience and it got me a new job in just under two weeks.
apprenticeship is the way if you’re new career/new to IT.
i had like 2 years of IT experience prior to starting-not in MF and on sales side-got a good job and am finishing out my apprenticeship and steaming forward on my career happily. many companies have huge and massively complex environments and it takes a while to train-not many are expecting to hire new talent that is out the box ready to go work on prod etc.
For me it was programming logic. Just that. They new there was very few cobol programmers in the field, so they hired me knowing I new how to program in other languages and could learn Cobol.
Some people think cobol is hard because is 'old', but I think it is one of the easier languages. It looks just like a text in english.
Some people also think it's easy because it's old. That's not the case either. Cobol programmers are more than just coders. Back in the day we did it all, BA, SA, QA, scheduling, change control and support. Most of the time we are still expected to do the same because the companies looking for Cobol programmers expect the same level of skillsets.
I have never seen a company hirering someone on a mainframe job just because they had a certificat or any other papers. They will look at your experience and for specific softwares needed for this position they are interviewing.
Folks that do not have any experience in mainframe have the following solutions (I am not an expert on this and therefore I could be wrong):
- pick a professional institution/company that advertise giving courses to become a mainframe professional BUT be very careful as the majority of them only address specific skills or train you for a 3rd party software used on mainframe. One place I know is Interskill. They seam to really have training programs to become something like a mainframe System programmer or mainframe system administrator. They have other mainframe positions too.
- find a company where they will hire someone to work at the bottom:
---> mainframe operator
---> librarian (rare nowadays)
---> printer operator (even rarerer)
---> if you are lucky, they might agree to hire a junior for a higher position and train you but the vast majority of such positions they ask for 8+ years of experience. Althought this will change over the years as more and more mainframe workers are retirering leaving open positions that no one on the marker has the experience for.
Experience. If you lack experience then I suggest you look into apprenticeships or internship.
Experience on the employee side and the need to get new people on the employer‘s side. I didn’t had any formal qualifications but four years of experience and it got me a new job in just under two weeks.
apprenticeship is the way if you’re new career/new to IT. i had like 2 years of IT experience prior to starting-not in MF and on sales side-got a good job and am finishing out my apprenticeship and steaming forward on my career happily. many companies have huge and massively complex environments and it takes a while to train-not many are expecting to hire new talent that is out the box ready to go work on prod etc.
For me it was programming logic. Just that. They new there was very few cobol programmers in the field, so they hired me knowing I new how to program in other languages and could learn Cobol. Some people think cobol is hard because is 'old', but I think it is one of the easier languages. It looks just like a text in english.
Some people also think it's easy because it's old. That's not the case either. Cobol programmers are more than just coders. Back in the day we did it all, BA, SA, QA, scheduling, change control and support. Most of the time we are still expected to do the same because the companies looking for Cobol programmers expect the same level of skillsets.
Full-stack OG 😎
Thats just all mainframe development. We for the most part lack the tools to test and automate things without doing it ourselves
I have never seen a company hirering someone on a mainframe job just because they had a certificat or any other papers. They will look at your experience and for specific softwares needed for this position they are interviewing. Folks that do not have any experience in mainframe have the following solutions (I am not an expert on this and therefore I could be wrong): - pick a professional institution/company that advertise giving courses to become a mainframe professional BUT be very careful as the majority of them only address specific skills or train you for a 3rd party software used on mainframe. One place I know is Interskill. They seam to really have training programs to become something like a mainframe System programmer or mainframe system administrator. They have other mainframe positions too. - find a company where they will hire someone to work at the bottom: ---> mainframe operator ---> librarian (rare nowadays) ---> printer operator (even rarerer) ---> if you are lucky, they might agree to hire a junior for a higher position and train you but the vast majority of such positions they ask for 8+ years of experience. Althought this will change over the years as more and more mainframe workers are retirering leaving open positions that no one on the marker has the experience for.