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 !