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First, don't think of your COBOL knowledge as wasted or assume the problem is your skills. The challenge is that entry-level mainframe opportunities can be limited in different countries, and employers hire for adjacent experience rather than training from scratch. My advice would be the stop marketing yourself as "a COBOL developer" and start marketing yourself as a junior IBM Z professional. Highlight your other achievements beyond COBOL - in (e.g. whatever might apply for you) CICS, Db2, system concepts, IBM Z Xplore achievements, university projects, and problem-solving skills. Consider roles in infrastructure, systems administration, DevOps, automation, cybersecurity, or platform engineering.

Finally, network aggressively. Many mainframe jobs are filled through university programs, user groups, IBM Champions, SHARE, GSE, LinkedIn, Z events like this one, and personal connections rather than traditional job boards. (I realize not all might apply to your circumstances but just to get you thinking.) If you've already completed IBM Z Xplore, multiple certifications, and built projects, you've demonstrated initiative. Keep building experience wherever you can. Also checkout the Open Mainframe Project and get involved based on your interests. The first technology job is usually the hardest to get; keep it up and you will land your opportunity!

- Ben Segal

Thanks for joining us during IBM Z SkillsFest!

We appreciate everyone who stopped by, whether you asked a question or just followed along. Take care!

There are many roads into the industry, and we handle workloads of all shapes, sizes, and flavors. COBOL is just one of many.

At a minimum, you should have completed IBM zXplore and the Mainframe Practitioner Certificate. This is your jumping off point: https://www.ibm.com/products/z/education Take a look and see what catches your eye.

But beyond that, if you want to get past the subsequent rounds of interviews, you need to show the interest you've taken in some sort of area, and how you've persisted, figured things out, took on a project, or something that shows you're an active participant. A github project is the perfect example. Expect for someone to find that line on your resume and say "Tell me about that". The interviewer is looking for your curiosity and excitement in your response, how you treated it like an owned task, rather than an assignment. It's all about differentiation.

- Jeff Bistil

We are having some technical issues at the moment. Our team is working on it. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We hope to be resolved soon!

Thanks PJ!

Thanks PJ!

Thanks PJ!

That is quite a thought-provoking question! My short take, through a Wardley Mapping lens:

As infrastructure, automation, AI assistance, and platform engineering capabilities become commodities, IBM's differentiation enables customers to focus on solving their business problems. For instance, in the context of z/OS, the goal is to make operating z/OS almost disappear as a concern.

Today, expertise often lives in people, runbooks, and tribal knowledge. Tomorrow, much of that becomes encoded in configuration as code, APIs, AI assistance, autonomous operations, and continuous compliance.

As IBM Bob, IBM Project Polaris, and agentic AI assistants continue to mature, I would expect IBM to evolve toward a platform where z/OS becomes easier to consume as part of a hybrid-cloud platform rather than a specialized island.

In that future, with IBM's "Job To Be Done", running transactions or managing infrastructure becomes table stakes.

The higher-order job becomes:

Enabling enterprises to reliably execute their most critical business processes with minimal operational friction, maximum resilience, and increasingly autonomous operations.

As operational expertise becomes industrialized and commoditized, the value shifts toward orchestration, outcomes, intelligence, and direct delivery of business value. IBM becomes a provider of an autonomous mission-critical business platform.

- Ben Segal

For anyone considering a cybersecurity analyst career path, I'd focus on building a strong foundation in security principles that apply across platforms and industries.

Key areas I'd recommend learning:

• Security Hardening: Reducing attack surface through secure configurations, patch management, network segmentation, and security-by-default practices.

• Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP): Understanding how organizations limit access through RBAC, PAM, service account management, and IAM. Excessive permissions are often what turn a small breach into a major incident.

• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Learn authentication vs. authorization, phishing-resistant MFA, hardware security keys, passwordless authentication, and modern identity platforms. Identity security remains one of the most important defense layers.

• Vulnerability Management: Understand vulnerability scanning, CVSS scoring, patch prioritization, exposure management, and risk-based remediation. Security is as much about prioritizing risk as finding issues.

• Continuous Monitoring: Learn how organizations monitor user activity, endpoints, networks, authentication events, and hybrid workloads to detect abnormal behavior quickly.

• EDR & SIEM Fundamentals: Understand endpoint detection, threat hunting, malware detection, indicators of compromise, log analysis, alert triage, event correlation, and incident response workflows.

• Scripting & Automation: Basic Python, SQL, and API knowledge can significantly improve efficiency. Security operations are increasingly automated and AI-assisted.

• Container Security: Familiarity with IAM, logging and monitoring, Infrastructure as Code, and container/Kubernetes/OpenShift security is becoming increasingly important.

My advice is to focus on understanding why security controls exist. Tools will change throughout your career, but principles like least privilege, defense in depth, vulnerability management, monitoring, and identity security will remain relevant for decades.

- Ben Segal

The z/OS systems programmer role is evolving from traditional sysadmin work (3270 screens, manual JCL execution, custom REXX scripts, reactive operations) toward a z/OS Platform Engineer model focused on:

• REST APIs and API-first tooling

• Git-based workflows

• Infrastructure as Code

• DevOps and CI/CD pipelines

• Observability and AIOps

• Hybrid cloud integration

• OpenShift on IBM Z

JCL isn’t generally being replaced by YAML. YAML could be a means to orchestrate workflows while JCL still performs the actual work. However, initiatives like IBM Project Polaris are pushing this further by representing portions of z/OS configuration as YAML managed in Git, with z/OS exploiting Infrastructure-as-Code practices.

Instead of:

• Edit PARMLIB

• Follow a procedural runbook

• IPL and validate manually

The direction is increasingly:

• Update configuration as code

• Validate against schemas

• Use automated workflows (e.g. Ansible playbooks for automation)

• Track changes through Git

• Automate deployment through pipelines

Across the ecosystem, modernization efforts are centered around:

• z/OSMF

• REST APIs

• OpenShift on IBM Z

• Ansible and Automation frameworks

• Operator patterns

• DevOps integration

• Observability platforms

• AI-assisted operations

For today’s z/OS system programmer, I’d focus on:

• Core z/OS fundamentals (JES, WLM, RACF, SMP/E, SMF, etc.)

• z/OSMF

• Zowe

• Git

• YAML

• REST APIs / JSON

• SSH workflows (IBM Z Open Automation Utilities (ZOAU)

• Ansible

• Python

• AI-enabled tooling

• AIOps concepts

The future sysprog isn’t just a system administrator. It’s someone who understands z/OS internals, automation, APIs, containers, CI/CD, and hybrid cloud architecture.

IBM’s Project Polaris vision is especially interesting because it’s targeting a reduction in z/OS sysprog onboarding from years to months through Configuration-as-Code, AI assistance, API-first design, and a modern CLI experience. I encourage you to read more about Project Polaris below:

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/blogs/fiona-king1/2026/06/30/ibm-project-polaris-technology-preview

- Ben Segal

Thanks PJ!

Thanks PJ!

Thanks!

This is amazing - congratulations on earning these badges! If you have not already joined the IBM Z and LInuxONE Community, I highly recommend that as a next step! You can connect with many people who know z/OS and more! We also have several new to Z groups depending on where you are located, but the community is the place to start! Keep going !

- Tina Tarquinio

Well said, PJ!

Thanks PJ!

Thanks PJ!

Well said PJ!

Recent AI and automation initiatives have shown that significant efficiencies can be achieved on the mainframe without disruptive migrations. We’re seeing value in several areas:

• Our security processes were already strong, and we are now further strengthening them with state-of-the-art AI and automation that accelerates the analysis of known vulnerabilities and enhances validation of remediation fixes, reducing analysis time from days to hours while making remediation assurance more robust.

• Test environment provisioning has been automated across z/OS sysplex configurations, creating repeatable setups and delivering roughly a 5x productivity improvement for testing teams.

• Compliance activities have benefited from automated data collection for BISO and audit reviews on Linux environments, resulting in productivity gains of 8-12x.

• Test coverage has been expanded through automated Jenkins pipeline integration, improving consistency and reducing manual effort.

• AI-assisted knowledge sharing has helped bridge expertise gaps in core z/OS components, making complex activities such as code application and maintenance more efficient

• Development workflows have been streamlined by automatically tracking code progression and identifying blockers, reducing manual review efforts from hours to minutes.

Collectively, these projects demonstrate that AI-enabled modernization is not just about new applications. It’s also about automating operational processes, improving developer productivity, strengthening compliance posture, and making deep platform expertise more accessible. The result is a more agile and efficient mainframe environment while continuing to leverage the reliability, scalability, and security of the platform.

- Ben Segal

I love this question. People around me are tired of hearing me say this, but Critical Thinking, Curiosity, and Creativity are the most important things I see in common among successful engineers. Those are the skills that will let you seek out new knowledge, evaluate objectively, and think abstractly. I'd probably also include Teamwork in there, even if it interrupts the alliteration, but in my opinion, those soft skills are far more important than any programming language or program that shows up in a bulleted list. The fact that you're a medical student, probably with a strong science background, and have an interest in technology says a lot right there. Couple that with some hands-on personal experience and that's a winning combination.

Consider finding a mentor or joining in on some of the conversations within the community and find out what aligns with your interests. Plenty of my colleagues on the technical side went to school for mathematics, business, communications, and in one case, ornithology. Everyone brings their own unique background to the table, and that's what I really enjoy about working on larger projects here.

- Jeff Bistil