Breaking into a Mainframe/COBOL job

Created on July 28, 2022, 9:06 p.m. - by Nicholas,

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Hello ladies and gents,

I cut my teeth in the indurstry on IBM Assembler, COBOL, ISAM, VSAM, DL1, CICS, and utilities [no IMS, worked in a VSE world].  At the time, we, out of necessity, did a lot of things with COBOL that wasn't available off the shelf, like bit positional fields, and something called packed stripped (no sign nibble) - space was had at a premium.  That was 4 decades ago.

I transitioned out of system development and worked for an IBM competitor from the early 80s on as a Technical Sales Support Engineer (sometimes called Solution Architects.)  I never went back to development, except to write a "quick & dirty" piece of code to prove a concept.

I want to get back to work doing mainframe programming.  I'm now taking a COBOL refresher course from LinkedIn; and so far, I'm acing it. I also downloaded Z/OS versions of the COBOL Programming Guide, Programmer Reference Guide, and Principles of Operation.

I have no DB2 hands-on experience; but, I do have extensive experience with a competitor's DB engine (not Oracle, & though I'm a certified SQL Server engineer, not with it.)

I have a wealth of knowledge; I've developed batch, OLTP, OLQP, OLAP, . . .  .  The problem I have is convincing a hiring manager that I haven't forgot it and lost my edge.

I'm open to any observations, suggestions, or points that you may have to help me get my plan off the ground.

Thanks!

Nicholas

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