COBOL programmers -- your time may have come
If, like me, your early introduction to computers was learning to code COBOL, don't despair because those old skills may still prove useful.
Research by jobs website Indeed has noted a 200 percent surge of interest in jobs and web searches for COBOL this month after the New Jersey governor made a plea for developers to help the state process unemployment claims.
By analyzing data from the Indeed site, which has 250 million unique visitors every month, and corroborating with Google Trends data on web searches, the research uncovered the massive spike in COBOL interest.
Simon Williams, CEO of IT services company NTT DATA UK says:
It comes as no surprise that there has been a surge in interest in COBOL. There are a lot of legacy systems in operation, reliant on legacy code. This has to be a wakeup call -- if organisations don't have the skills to maintain their code, they need to modernise.
Legacy modernisation has been a balance between the risk of replacing old technology and the risk of not having the skills to maintain it. This time has accelerated the realisation that half moving to digital is not enough. Whether it is moving off legacy code or migration to the cloud business need to go fully digital. This also gives businesses the opportunity to update and modernise their systems.
Although it was introduced in the era of punch cards and mainframe computers, COBOL has endured over the years, especially in back-office tasks such as processing forms and payments. Thousands of enterprises and public sector organizations still rely on mainframe systems running COBOL for tasks such as banking transactions, payroll, and enterprise resource planning. But finding skilled programmers to maintain the billions of lines of COBOL code in use is becoming increasingly difficult.
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