Any certications geared towards mainframe hardware or operating systems?

I know in the financial sector and insurance sector they utilize mainframe technology still. The computing power is extremely powerful and the reliability is far superior to a midrange. Plus the transaction speed is extremely quick.

Are these making a comeback and if so are there certifications or training courses to learn this technology?

I am very interested to see the responses.

My mother is a COBOL/REXX programmer and works on mainframe JCL. Very old school LOL

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Comments

pram

IBM offers a lot of opportunities to people wanting to learn z/OS. You actually ask at a great time because there's a yearly contest going on right now where you get a free z/OS shell to mess around with:IBM Master the Mainframe Contest 2011

I did it this year and got the free t-shirt

Also this is THE cert people look for when hiring z/OS admins, btw. The nice thing is its free right now:

IBM System z Mastery Test

Its still all REXX and JCL too, so you can even ask your mom for help haha.

N2IT

pram wrote: »

IBM offers a lot of opportunities to people wanting to learn z/OS. You actually ask at a great time because there's a yearly contest going on right now where you get a free z/OS shell to mess around with:IBM Master the Mainframe Contest 2011

I did it this year and got the free t-shirt

Also this is THE cert people look for when hiring z/OS admins, btw. The nice thing is its free right now:

IBM System z Mastery Test

Its still all REXX and JCL too, so you can even ask your mom for help haha.

Great stuff you are an awesome resource! +1 rep

Can this OS be installed on virtual box?

instant000

I remember taking COBOL in college prior to Y2K

N2IT

instant000 wrote: »

I remember taking COBOL in college prior to Y2K

LOL

50+ years and still being used

NinjaBoy

Not sure about vendor specific certifications (but see above in other posts), but in the UK the British Computer Society (BSC) does the Mainframe Technology Professional certification. Not sure what area you're in, so this may or may not help

Zentraedi

I work at a large financial services company and our main data center hasn't had a mainframe for years.

That's all stuff people are moving away from.

Current "invest" designated platforms are: Solaris, VMware, Win2k8, SLES.

N2IT

Zentraedi wrote: »

I work at a large financial services company and our main data center hasn't had a mainframe for years.

That's all stuff people are moving away from.

Current "invest" designated platforms are: Solaris, VMware, Win2k8, SLES.

Maybe so, but I work in a town where IBM is headquartered. I am really wanting to get into their company and it seems mainframes could be the in.

I already have a part time job now as a transiton consultant Friday through Sunday I operate and currently landed a medium paying support job M-F, but if I could get on with IBM that would be great.

TheShadow

N2IT wrote: »

Maybe so, but I work in a town where IBM is headquartered. I am really wanting to get into their company and it seems mainframes could be the in.

I already have a part time job now as a transiton consultant Friday through Sunday I operate and currently landed a medium paying support job M-F, but if I could get on with IBM that would be great.

I think that is a possibly good career move. Despite what some people believe about the 25 year eminent death of mainframes, IBM alone does about 1 billion per quarter in mainframe sales which represents around 25 percent of their quarterly revenue. To that you have to add the third party ecosystem. There are lots of people making a good living monitoring that death watch. Fujitsu still maintains a decent COBOL compiler that runs on the PC and Visual Studio; NetCOBOL for windows version 9. Admiral (Amazing) Grace Hopper is probably looking down from overhead and smiling at the people still practicing the language of the first ones hoping to be buried "face down nine edge first!"

alan2308

N2IT wrote: »

Great stuff you are an awesome resource! +1 rep

Can this OS be installed on virtual box?

Probably not, Virtual Box emulates a PC. But take a look at Hercules.