MIS Personnel
References Training & Skills Case
April 11, 1994
Her employer had moved out of town, leaving Evans to eventually find contract work in mainframe programming. Those jobs have kept her afloat, but as she read through the help wanted ads, there was "more and more PC. . . [and] less and less my kind of mainframe, which is IDMS and COBOL," she said.
So Evans, based in Chicago, is spending 3 hours a night, four nights a week, learning C, Windows, Visual Basic, and Microsoft Access on her home PC. And while she hasn't yet found work in the PC LAN area, this former mainframer has a good shot at hooking up with a LAN-locked corporation, according to IS managers and search professionals.
That's because the mainframe operating disciplines that Evans knows well, such as security, backup, version control, and data integrity, are becoming valuable skills in the client/server world as companies put their critical applications on LANs or PC and Unix servers.
But-to put those talents to work in the client/server world, IS veterans are finding they must also get experience with today's popular tools and learn more about their users and their users' business problems.
"You still need to test on any platform; you still need to have data integrity," said Michael Wick, a programmer /analyst with CCC Information Services Inc., a Chicago insurance-industry services firm. "Those types of skills you hone through experience" and can carry over to the client/server world, said Wick, who used to program for IBM mainframes but now works with Powersoft Corp.'s PowerBuilder and Sybase Inc.'s SQL Server.
It's exactly that experience that many PC-based developers lack, said Linda Starkey, an information-services manager for Wake County, N.C.
"Mainframe people are used to looking at what the whole group is doing, the whole organization," and using that information to better design applications and help re-engineer business processes, said Starkey. "People who only worked on a PC ... don't think like that."
Eighty percent of central IS organizations have effective capabilities in areas such as capacity planning, disaster recovery, and security. But "when you go into the end-user or client/server environment, that level is more like 30 percent," said John Halloran, a managing partner at Nolan, Norton & Co., a Boston consulting firm.
IS veterans have little choice but to make the most of their mainframe operational experience and their business background, said Doug MacLeod, a partner with Desaulniers MacLeod Ltd., a Chicago-based IS placement firm.
"If you're a person with 10 years of IS background and you're making $55,000, and you have a lot of experience with [3270 connectivity and Systems Network Architecture], you can't compete" with a college graduate who's spent four years programming for UNIX or Windows, said Macload.
"The place where you really can compete," he said, "is in dealing with the users," drawing on experience to sift out what users need compared to what they say they want. Because of such experience, MacLeod often places senior COBOL programmers "who have a little bit of exposure to Visual Basic" as leaders of client/server development teams.
Consulting companies that have gone through failed client/server development efforts are already asking for project management, change control, testing, and documentation experience in their applicants as well as technical skills, he said. Corporate customers, by contrast, are just starting to see the need for such skills.
Once they're in the new environment, mainframers also have to learn to apply the old rules selectively, so they don't bog down what should be a fast, flexible development process.
Starkey's mainframe database administrator, for example, also handles the LAN database.
"It's good when he won't let someone make a change to a program ... which will affect 500 people," she said. It limits the company's flexibility, however, when he imposes the same rigid rules on smaller applications.
Getting crucial hands-on tools experience can be difficult for many programmers, because companies balk at spending upward of $20,000 to train employees-who may then leave for higher-paying jobs.
Whether to retrain existing staff is a "classic toss-up," said Judith Lane Watson, a user-support manager with Imperial Holly Corp., a sugar producer in Sugar Land, Texas. "Do you go with someone who knows your business inside out, or do you take a young whippersnapper, fresh out of college, who has learned the tools but doesn't have a clue about your business?"
Watson's firm is retraining its veteran staffers, assuming they know the business best and are loyal enough not to jump ship with their new, marketable skills.
The combination of GUI design skills and business knowledge, in fact, is the best way for any IS professional to pave a good long-term career path, said Gene Raphaelian, a vice president in the Santa Clara, Calif., office of market researcher Gartner Group Inc.
In the short run, however, IS managers and placement professionals had the same advice for endangered mainframers: Learn more about your business and more about client/server tools.
"If you don't want to practice your graphical front-end development, practice, `Would you like fries with that burger?' " said MacLeod. Because that's what's going to happen sooner or later."