Re: How competent are we?

On Jul 15, 10:22 pm, billg...@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bill Gunshannon) wrote:
I have looked for jobs as a COBOL programmer again.  I would love to end my
career doing COBOL again.  There are lots of jobs most int he six figures
catagory.  The only thing that keeps me from taking one is not the language
but the OS.  Most of them require current CICS experience which I don't have,
having moved from IBM to Unisys a long, long time ago.


bill


Mr. Bill Gunshannon,

I will endeavor to respond to what I see as the core of your post,
that is, obtaining a COBOL assignment though you lack the "current"
CICS skills...

I was in a similar situation myself several years ago... most of my
COBOL experience was in Honeywell/Bull, and only a smidgeon on IBM,
and that was mostly in IBM VM/CMS and not Z/OS.

Though nothing works "for sure", you might try these angles...

1. As billious implied, you might try the shops posting jobs that
include an online "preprocessor", like Telon, or if I understood
billious correctly, maybe MANTIS does much the same thing - "insulate"
you from CICS. Sure, they'll want explicit MANTIS or Telon experience
specifically, but that might be harder to get, so nearly all
candidates will fall somewhat "short", and you might be able to slide
in...

2. As Mr. Dashwood points out, there is a dearth of "new development"
in COBOL, though there may still be significant "enhancment" efforts
underway (there still is in my shop.) Nonetheless, you might try
emphasizing "maintenance" skills in your resume, as some shop might
even consider "enhancements" as "maintenance". (Actually, in the
software engineering vernacular, maintenance includes corrective,
adaptive, perfective, and preventive efforts, and enhancements comes
pretty close to "perfective"). Along those same lines, emphasize your
defect identification, diagnosis, and remediation (bug-fixing) skills.

3. Look for a match with your subject-matter expertise (insurance?
financials? manufacturing?) that might compensate for lack of CICS
skills. Or look for a client shop that still does significant batch
processing where the online stuff maybe won't matter as much.

4. If you can settle for less money :-), you could try a government
contract, either Uncle Sam or a state government. It might be hard to
get a permanent job, but they do a lot of contracting, and often those
contracts have to be re-bid every four or five years. The prime
contractor will often be required to do a small business or minority
business "set aside" (maybe five or ten percent), and you could
contact the likes of the minority-business-enterprises (MBE's) and
women-business-enterprises (WBE's) to register with them before they
line up behind the primes. That is how a number of my peers got on our
current contract.

5. There is still some Unisys work around :-). Please do a Reply to
Author to contact me offline if you wish. I know of a government
contract to replace a Unisys mainframe with a Java-based client/server
system. That effort started four years ago. About a year ago a
headhunter contacted me for a Unisys slot there. I don't think the
mainframe is pushed out the door quite yet. I've lost that contractor
contact, but I know someone over there as a permanent employee...


Good luck...

Ken
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Declining Cobol job market
    ... ARE COBOL "jobs". ... COBOL contract" work ... than full-time employees. ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Re: OT- WalMart impact on Us
    ... "But the jobs at those other stores don't just ... had decided that by its calculations a cheaper toothpaste ... If your depot was actually performing a needed function, it just moved to another base. ... If Sikorsky could do your depot's job, why wasn't it written in the original purchasing contract? ...
    (rec.outdoors.rv-travel)
  • Re: COBOLs Influence on C
    ... They must not work in large shops that run 100,000 jobs per month. ... the reason is because they run so much Cobol, ... Deployment to production is controlled by a third group: ... Verification runs on the production machine. ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Re: COBOLs Influence on C
    ... The references for job failure rate can be: ... former got it down by doing things like validating jobs. ... Most causes of failure are unrelated to Cobol. ... A bad library path is one common reason, ...
    (comp.lang.cobol)
  • Re: Grow Up
    ... By their fruits shall you know them etc. ... It is by internationalists' fruits that I ... as many jobs into independent contract status as quickly as possible. ...
    (rec.music.dylan)