Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi,

I have been a Mainframe programmer of 10 years and in live in India. There is a big push to learn new skills so as to be in demand well within the IT industry. Need help in to know, what are some of the things that a mainframer can learn which will be useful in future with not much to depend on the training intitutes and moving the projects with in the company. I mean, like learning ETL is not possible without having the proper environment and/or licenses but what is next for us?

If you are working in to IT, you'll be in that situation, roughly, in every 10 years I believe -- it does not really meant for mainframes' only. I believe it's necessary to spend sometime with your self to think what interests you and than take a decision. For example, personally Cloud Computing, Big Data and DevOps interests me and I try to spend some time with them every now and then and then there is hope to look forward to in future.

Hope that helps.

what are some of the things that a mainframer can learn which will be useful in future

This largely depends upon what YOU find interesting -- if you check http://www.redbooks.ibm.com you can see there's a lot of possible directions to go in. Which way to go should depend upon how you want to proceed and what you've already learned. Web access to the mainframe, cloud computing, Big Data, Java and CICS are just a few of the topics covered in the last couple of months of Redbooks. On the systems side, z/OSMF is becoming more and more important with each release of z/OS.