The Mainframe Skills Gap: Closing It Without COBOL

What is the mainframe skills gap, and how can enterprises close it without hiring more COBOL programmers? VirtualZ Computing CTO Vince Re tackles one of the most pressing problems in enterprise IT: the COBOL, JCL, and REXX experts who keep IBM Z mainframes running are retiring faster than they can be replaced, and few new engineers are trained on those technologies. The mainframes still process core banking, insurance, and government workloads — but the people who understand them are aging out.

Vince Re argues the fix isn't finding more mainframe specialists. It's making deep mainframe expertise optional for the integration layer, so the cloud-native and DevOps engineers enterprises already employ can work with mainframe data directly — without learning COBOL or REXX.

In this episode of Skyward Data, the podcast from VirtualZ Computing:

- What the mainframe skills gap is, why it's accelerating, and what it costs enterprises that don't plan for it - Why hiring against a shrinking COBOL and REXX talent pool is a losing strategy - How cloud and DevOps teams can own mainframe data integration using skills they already have - The economics of leveraging abundant cloud-native talent instead of rare, expensive mainframe specialists - How to build a mainframe data strategy that scales with your existing team

One practical answer is VirtualZ's no-code approach: PropelZ moves and replicates IBM Z mainframe data to the cloud — proven at 56,000 records per second — with no code and no homegrown pipelines, so teams integrate mainframe data without deep z/OS expertise. It's part of VirtualZ Computing's no-code portfolio for enterprise mainframe data, alongside Lozen (live in-place data access), FlowZ (cloud storage for backup and archive), and Zaac (cloud and SAN as native z/OS storage).

Topics: mainframe skills gap, COBOL skills shortage, IBM Z, z/OS, mainframe modernization, DevOps, cloud-native, IT talent shortage, no-code data integration, hybrid cloud.

Listen to more Skyward Data episodes: https://virtualzcomputing.com/podcasts/