The Micro Focus ACTION (Academic ConnecTIONs) program, which highlights and promotes the importance of core IT employees and the skills they can provide, works with over 100 academic institutions worldwide – and counting. Arunn Ramadoss, who heads up the program, believes that the likes of COBOL programming skills still have a big future.
Why is it important for today's "geeks" to hold on to such qualities?
Applications written in COBOL not only deliver business value, but encapsulate a lot of information about the processes that run the core business of any organisation. This puts many COBOL developers at the heart of the business and closer to actual business processes than any other type of developer.
COBOL developers have traditionally had a good understanding of business, as well as the value of their application to the business. Businesses place more importance on employees who can clearly demonstrate the value of their contribution and how this can be increased.
The inherent nature of COBOL and applications written in it makes it easy for COBOL people to recognise the importance of their contributions and puts them in a great position to work closely with the business.
Should others be looking to skill up in those areas then?
COBOL runs over 70% of the world's business. To put this in perspective, there are 200 times as many transactions handled by COBOL applications each day than there are Google searches!
Any programmer or developer aspiring to develop Enterprise IT systems can only possibly benefit from learning COBOL and related technologies. What organisations typically look for these days are programmers capable of both understanding their existing systems (which maybe largely written in COBOL), but also of modernising these applications.
COBOL as a language has evolved over years, and today ships with features and capabilities to meet modern requirements such as Graphical User Interface and Rich User Interface on the web and even mobile. COBOL is also capable of integrating with modern technologies such as JAVA and .Net.
Having the skills to modernise existing applications using these new features can really boost a programmer's career prospects and earning potential.
What skills specifically will be valuable moving forward?
There are over 5 million lines of new COBOL code still being developed each year, according to Gartner. The current COBOL code in production accounts for over 65% of all code in production today. This means COBOL is here to stay!
As a language, COBOL can be learnt by anyone in a matter of 2 or 3 weeks. Having the ability to understand and maintain COBOL applications is a very important skill for any programmer looking to build a career in developing Enterprise IT systems, but more importantly, having the "bridging skills" which allow you to modernise the COBOL applications to meet new business requirements and integrate with modern technologies such as JAVA and .NET will improve their career prospects even further.
