Please let me know the best way to expertise in Mainframes,

Other Mainframe related questions which attracts you and there is no suitable Forum you find for it and related FAQs.
Post Reply
Ramesh
New Member
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Jul 08, 2016 2:30 pm
Location: India

Please let me know the best way to expertise in Mainframes,

Post by Ramesh »

Anuj Dhawan wrote:With reference to the post: viewtopic.php?p=10083#p10083 this topic is here to initiate the discussion.
I always used to search for some information related to the technology i am working, in that way found this forum to be very effective in terms of solutions and topics discussed in here. Also solved many of my difficulties with the hints posted.

Please let me know the best way to expertise in Mainframes, also let me know how many divisions exist in Mainframes like JCL, COBOL, DB2.. 

One more Question: What is the scope of Mainframes in IT industry?
User avatar
Robert Sample
Global Moderator
Global Moderator
Posts: 1886
Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 1:22 am
Location: Dubuque Iowa
United States of America

Re: Please let me know the best way to expertise in Mainframes,

Post by Robert Sample »

Please let me know the best way to expertise in Mainframes, also let me know how many divisions exist in Mainframes like JCL, COBOL, DB2.. 

One more Question: What is the scope of Mainframes in IT industry?
That's a lot of topics for one post!  The best way to develop expertise in mainframes is to take the time.  I recall one of my professors in college stating that studies proved it requires 4,000 hours to master a topic.  So for mainframes and factoring in the 50% of the work day that you don't spend on the mainframe, you're looking at a minimum of 4 years of learning to master the subject.  And that will be longer if you don't spend much of your time learning.  Most of the experienced people on this and the other fora have more than 20 years experience with mainframes -- in my case, I started using mainframes in 1975 part-time and went full-time in 1977 so I have more than 39 years of daily interactions with mainframes.

I wouldn't call them "division" -- perhaps specialties would be a better word?  For a broad classification, mainframe work can be divided into systems and applications, where systems focuses on the hardware, operating system, and installed programs (installing updates, making performance changes, doing capacity planning, and working with vendors on hardware and software upgrades) and applications focuses on the programs people use to get their jobs done (and there are a wide variety of applications -- financial, inventory, manufacturing, HR, to name a few).  Anyway, depending upon how detailed you want to get, there are hundreds of programs that can be installed on a mainframe -- from programming languages to complete applications to skeletons that must be customized to the customer's needs.

I'm not sure what you mean by "scope of mainframes" -- if you use an ATM anywhere in the world, the last I heard there is a 90% chance that your data will be on a mainframe at some point.  92% of Fortune 500 companies have mainframes, and these days mainframes are used for pretty much any application you can think of.  IBM is pushing the system z for cloud-based computing, for example.  I wrote HTML code on a mainframe more than 10 years ago that was used to access -- from the PC browser -- manuals and help screens for the applications programmers.
Post Reply

Create an account or sign in to join the discussion

You need to be a member in order to post a reply

Create an account

Not a member? register to join our community
Members can start their own topics & subscribe to topics
It’s free and only takes a minute

Register

Sign in

Return to “Other Mainframe Topics, Off-Topics, FAQs.”