IBM has announced the winners of a
competition designed to encourage the teaching
of mainframe skills in colleges and
universities.
Although mainframes remain popular in large businesses, the
skills required to support and develop these systems are in
decline, said Roy Struthers, IBM's director of System z mainframes
in the UK.
Many mainframe professionals are nearing retirement, and
students do not realise there is a growing market for mainframe
skills, he said.
"At university, there is not a lot of business computing taught,
and not a lot about operating systems. What there is focuses on
Unix, Windows and Linux. It is not that they have a dated view of
the mainframe it is that they have no view at all," said
Struthers.
The UK winners of the
Master the Mainframe contest were Stephan
Liwicki from the University of Leeds, James Powell from the
University of Oxford and Seyed Mohammadali Eslami from the
University of Edinburgh.
More than 700 students from 41 universities took part in the
competition. The winners each receive a Lenovo Thinkpad, plus a
visit to IBM Hursley, Winchester.
Struthers said the competition entrants did not know that
mainframes were still used by many major corporations. "It has
surprised the students how widely mainframes are used and how
important it continues to be."
Young IT professionals looking for a stable career in the future
could do worse than developing some mainframe skills, he said. "If
you're looking for a platform that's going to be around for 30
years, there's only one that's been around for that time and will
be here in 30-40 years to come and it's still growing rapidly."
The competition is just one part of IBM's initiative to
encourage mainframe skills at universities. From Montpelier France,
the firm is offering access to a System z
"More widely, we are trying to get mainframe back on the
curriculum in the UK and across Europe," Struthers said. "And back
on the agenda, from a technical point of view and from a business
point of view."
IBM Academic Initiative >>
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