HoGent visits montpellier - young people do appreciate the mainframe

I came across this on LinkedIn, the new place to be :-), and I just couldn't resist posting this over here as well. Do have a look at it.

Belgian Mainframe students looking for a training place

I've been discussing the Academic Initiative, young mainframers or the lack of it in several previous posts. So here's my little contribution in finding a training place for some of our Belgian mainframe students.

Hogeschool Gent (a Belgian college) is one of those schools offering a mainframe specialization. This does not only involve following some courses but also a real life training period in an actual mainframe environment. In other words : in your company ! Due to the succes of this mainframe specialization (yes, really !), the school is still looking for some companies who want to give their students a chance for a real life opportunity.

What does it involve ? Two students will work out a very concrete project you have in mind. The goal is to have a well defined project on which they will be working full time in your company for about 3 months. They are assisted by a tutor from your company who is appointed to them.

If you're interested and want to have more details, please contact Angeline Van Achter who is responsible for the traineeships at Hogeschool Gent. She has all the additional information you need. Or you can drop me a note as well. You know where to find me.

So stop saying there are no young people choosing mainframe. There are. And they need you. And don't forget : you'll need them ! One last note : we see that companies offering this traineeship to students are very proud of their students, of what they accomplish and they often offer them to stay after they graduate from school.

Growing Academic Initiative

I just came across this chart and couldn't resist putting it up before leaving on holiday so I can end on a positive note. As you see, the Academic initiative is really doing great :
If you want to find out more, you can go to the IBM Academic Initiative System z Program page.

And for the occasional young people coming across this blog, there's an interesting interactive module on Careers in Mainframe in the Learn Section. Ok, the module is a few years old, stating the z990 as one of the newest machines around, but the message still comes across.

And rest assured, you can definitely build a career in mainframe. Look e.g. at the zNextGen initiative. I already mentioned Kristin Harper's blog which has now changed into Kristin Neely's Newbie blog (by the way, congratulations Kristin) and maybe by now Kristin should consider leaving out the 'newbie' in the blog title. But I see also the deputy Project Manager of zNextGen, Reg Harbeck, has his own blog. Here's a piece of his writing :

"Tron" - remember that? If you do, you're definitely old enough to be a mainframer.
Then again, pretty soon, the average mainframer may be so young they won't even remember Y2K.
And that's OK. As the first generations of mainframers pass the torch to the next generation, the important thing is that the new generation inherits something that works.
That's the beauty of the mainframe (...)

As you see, I'm just putting up a teaser. For the rest, you'll have to go over there and check it out yourselves.

And by the way : have a nice holiday !