Created on July 28, 2022, 9:06 p.m. - by Nicholas,
Hello ladies and gents,
I cut my teeth in the indurstry on IBM Assembler, COBOL, ISAM, VSAM, DL1, CICS, and utilities [no IMS, worked in a VSE world]. At the time, we, out of necessity, did a lot of things with COBOL that wasn't available off the shelf, like bit positional fields, and something called packed stripped (no sign nibble) - space was had at a premium. That was 4 decades ago.
I transitioned out of system development and worked for an IBM competitor from the early 80s on as a Technical Sales Support Engineer (sometimes called Solution Architects.) I never went back to development, except to write a "quick & dirty" piece of code to prove a concept.
I want to get back to work doing mainframe programming. I'm now taking a COBOL refresher course from LinkedIn; and so far, I'm acing it. I also downloaded Z/OS versions of the COBOL Programming Guide, Programmer Reference Guide, and Principles of Operation.
I have no DB2 hands-on experience; but, I do have extensive experience with a competitor's DB engine (not Oracle, & though I'm a certified SQL Server engineer, not with it.)
I have a wealth of knowledge; I've developed batch, OLTP, OLQP, OLAP, . . . . The problem I have is convincing a hiring manager that I haven't forgot it and lost my edge.
I'm open to any observations, suggestions, or points that you may have to help me get my plan off the ground.
Thanks!
Nicholas