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February 26, 2013

Comments

CmasseVolubis

You're right, sometimes "young" and "RPG" is an oxymoron.

We are a French training company,trying to change that. Two or three times a year our customers recruit young people and ask us to teach them IBM i, DB2 and RPG.(A three-week session, last year we did it four times)

Of course, we use SQL and free RPG, even if we have to talk about DDS and fixed form RPG. Our tools are system i Navigator and RDP, no choice !

And i advise my customers to do the same "at home", if they want to keep their young developers

As you can see, it is possible to teach "IBMi", it's a wonderful system with many advantages that can be interesting for young people, but we have to show them the "sunny side".

Christian

torbjörn appehl

In Sweden, Tieto hired graduates who thought they were about to work with "Role Playing Game". But read about the sucess story on page 10 in our magazine: http://www.data3.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/data3_208.pdf . If you don't know swedish yet, bablefish it :-)

Christopher Burns, Sr.

That's how we started doing it a few years ago. We hired a young buck right out of college who knew PHP and had been a "Firedog" geek for years. That was out of character for us, but it was time for a change.

I took him on a road trip right away to sit in on a week's worth of RPG classes I was teaching down in Pennsylvania. He ramped up quickly. A lot quicker than any of the students (mostly COBOL programmers), I can tell you. Now he uses both technologies fluently every day.

Jean Mikhaleff

The difference between being young or not is to have 35 years yet to work. So, if you are a young developer, to survive, you have the choice between client/server and Cloud computing/Web nowadays. I think this might be a huge opportunity for the platform IBM i. Unfortunately I am alone to believe that we (old developer) are already cloud/computing but not native web yet.

dale janus

I am confused by your paragraph 5:

Graduates of existing programs can't get jobs because they don't have 3 to 5 years experience. But 'your clients' can't wait for those to graduate, they need someone now for 5 year plans.

Sounds like the classic Catch-22 to me.

Jon Paris

@Dale _ it is not actually as confusing as it sounds but I agree we didn't make it clear enough. I'll do it in bullet form to hopefully clarify:

1) Many college programs closed because they were unable to place graduates, This was mostly 2 - 3 years ago.

2) Some programs like Jim Buck's have done such a good job of finding mentors and educating their students in a highly practical manner that they are often over subscribed with more requests for grads than they have available.

3) It is program's like Jim's that we need to clone but ...

4) For many of our clients they need to see something happening in a shorter timeframe. Programs like the ones in France, Germany and Sweden are working and would help meet that need - but we're not seeing firms here in North America take that initiative.

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