COBOL Skills Gap opening wide

Today I read an interesting article from Ed Airey about the “COBOL Skills Gap“. When Ed says “If we don’t drive interest in IT the impact on business could be brutal.”, and I just can completely agree to this. I see COBOL Programmers leaving companies where they worked more then 30+ years. These Programmers built applications from scratch and maintained these for decades to adjust them to market needs. When these people retire they are sometimes replaced by 2 or more programmers to fill the gap. And I am talking about really experienced individuals, and yes, you guess right, they will also retire soon. Ed also writes: “The student perception of languages such as COBOL is that it is considered ‘un-cool, outdated or even ‘dead’. The current business use and reliance on the COBOL language demonstrates this to be an incorrect position.”  Agreed, I also find Java Programmers who talk about COBOL will be gone by 2015 because IBM will no longer develop CHIPs that can run COBOL Programs. I don’t know where they get this idea from but I know that we have to do something to share our knowledge with the future students. let's-talkI am wondering how one can help here. Myself I am writing in this ‘un-cool’ and ‘dead’ language since 25+ years. Using the Micro Focus Workbench I started writing Mainframe emulators. A complete Toolset to migrate files, run Batch processes and Emulating a whole Transactional System, all written in this ‘un-cool’ Language. How can we make students understand that COBOL is not dead? How can we make Teachers understanding that they have to teach even so called ‘dead’ languages? Let’s start the Discussion! You, yes you, who just read it, play the Ball.  Let’s talk. Wants to read the full Article? Here you go.

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