The mainframe was supposed to be extinct by now, but the 40-year-old platform looks like hanging around for years to come. As they linger on, a skills gap has arisen because young IT workers don't know healthy demand persists for mainframe skills.
With a focus on practical skills, IT degree students are receiving paid, on-the-job experience working with Australian mainframe users, including the Department of Defence, National Australia Bank and the Health Insurance Commission.

There are now 50 trainees enrolled in a program developed jointly by Global Online Learning and Griffith University to produce IT professionals working in the IBM zSeries environment.

IBM zSeries business unit executive Robyn Woodley said the mainframe trainee program, MainTrain, was meeting a need that had been building for the past five to 10 years.

"There was concern because most of the IT support for the mainframe was guys in their forties approaching retirement," Ms Woodley said.

After a decade of decline, mainframe revenue started to rise at the end of 2003 and continued to climb at double-digit rates, she said.

In 2004, revenue growth reached 34 per cent in the first quarter and 44 per cent in the second quarter, together making up 15 per cent of IBM's earnings.

"The mainframe has a very certain and strategic future," Ms Woodley said. "You just have to look at the investments that our clients and our business partners are making." IBM has more than 100 mainframe customers in Australia.

"They're high-end customers running mission-critical applications on the mainframe," Ms Woodley said.

"We typically have one to three new customers each year." Global Online Learning managing director Murray Woods said the program, which took students from any university in Australia, addressed the difficulty of retaining graduates, who usually had experience in NT and Unix but did not understand the complexity of the mainframe environment.

Dr Woods, who has a background in IT strategy consulting, started the program, whose intake is now to be boosted, with Dr Michael Crawford in 2002 to help meet the mainframe market's need for 300 to 500 recruits annually.

"There's not just a shortage of mainframe professionals, this is going to be a calamity in the near future," Dr Woods said.

Contracting rates for mainframe skills continued to rise year-on-year, he said.

Those with more than five years experience could earn about $100,000 in Australia, and more in the US.

Ambition Technology director Jane Bianchini said the demand for mainframe skills would continue, but warned of a "shallow talent pool" as a result of specialists retiring.

Candle ICT national manager Trevor Taylor said a career in mainframe was a "viable and interesting" option for young people entering the industry.

"For many years now, the market has deemed mainframe a dead technology," he said. "In reality, big businesses and governments have major systems on mainframes that are not going to be rewritten, and they must be supported."