There have been many recent articles regarding dearth of mainframe skills. The article talks about trillions of looming talent shortage and millions of unfilled jobs. This also includes mainframe technology. What we have today is the old traditional subject matter experts (SMEs) and system programmers who are on the verge of retirement. The younger generation who are supposed to pick up the baton are not there. Most of them have embraced cloud technologies as against the mainframe platforms.
Lack of mainframe skills affects the technical teams in maintaining mainframes and legacy software. It is not the people gap but the lack of skilled candidates that affects the Job market. The challenge is to find the right resources with the right skills.
We had the same issues when I started working In IBM 10 years back, but we never stopped there. We created a factory model to birth 40 to 50 mainframe system programmers every year! I will discuss about this model in my session.