By Pedro Pereira
Anyone who believes the mainframe is yesterday's technology, should consider this: plenty of mainframe tech jobs are currently available, and the number is bound to increase in coming years as long-time mainframe professionals reach retirement age. Veteran tech journalist Pedro Pereira explores the future of the mainframe-savvy workforce on SHARE's President's Corner. A number of speakers at SHARE in Atlanta, March 11-16, noted that people with mainframe skills tend to stand out in the IT tech crowd. And if that's not enough, many mainframe jobs pay well into the six figures. Although the mainframe has been overshadowed by glossy newer technologies, such as cloud computing and social networking, it continues to offer a viable career path for young up and coming techs.Mainframe installed capacity has grown at 19 percent annually since 2003. Regardless of that growth, the mainframe has fought an image battle since it was prematurely declared dead a couple of decades ago, as client/server systems - now being replaced by the cloud - became all the rage.During a session at the recent SHARE in Atlanta conference, thirty-two Atlanta-area high school students packed into a room to learn about mainframe opportunities. When Marc I. Smith, an IBM university ambassador in Texas, asked attendees "when was the last time someone had interacted with a mainframe?" He heard answers such as "The 1980s." That's when he pointed out that whenever you use a credit or debit card, a mainframe is doing the processing in the background.Read the full article at http://presidentscorner.share.org/.