RPG & DB2 Summit Registrations Rise, Signals Progress In IBM i Shops
September 9, 2013 Dan Burger
|
RPG & DB2 Summit Registrations Rise, Signals Progress In IBM i Shops
The skills gap for IBM midrange professionals may be narrowing. At least there’s an indication that may be true. Tech conferences in general have reported attendance as mostly flat over the past several years and more are shriveling than blossoming. But at the same time, companies are scrambling to solve business issues and looking to IT for the answers. Solutions, in many cases, require new skills. In-house IT investment can’t be overlooked. The most promising indicator of an upswing in skills comes from System i Developer, the consortium of educators on IBM i development technologies. This group, which is headed up by Jon Paris, Susan Gantner, and Paul Tuohy, produces the RPG & DB2 Summit on a twice annual basis. Although attendance has remained fairly constant during the past five or six Summit events, as SiD prepares for the next Summit in October it has expanded by 50 percent the conference room space to accommodate the increase in registrations. The upcoming Summit is scheduled for October 15-17 at the Hotel Sofitel in Minneapolis, Minnesota–a location that has proved popular for several Summit events in the past. Other locations that have hosted this event include St. Louis, Fort Worth, Orlando, Atlanta, and Las Vegas. Another indicator of perhaps a rising interest in skills development relative to the Summit is an increased number of seats available in Susan Gantner’s Hands-On RSE Workshop. RSE, short for Remote Systems Explorer, is part of the modern Rational Developer for i development tools package. As interest in modernization increases, interest in RSE follows and skills development is part of the mix. An increase in RSE training is a sign that shops consider modern application development as a means to solve business problems. The RSE workshop is one of three single-topic super sessions that are scheduled just ahead of the Summit. The other pre-conference workshop topics are PHP and SQL. Mike Pavlak handles the PHP instruction and Paul Tuohy and Kent Milligan spilt the SQL teaching. Paris and Gantner, who operate as a team as well as independently, testify to a steadily growing demand for training services during the past two years. Both are internationally recognized experts who are engaged with companies for on-site training as their primary business. “Initially the training was nearly all based on Rational tools and we usually persuaded companies to add RPG/SQL skills updates on the basis of why use new tools with old techniques,” Paris says. “In the past 12 months, there has been an increase in demand for SQL and RPG skills and the Rational topic is often secondary. So, yes, we have seen an upswing in demand for education. We suspect, but cannot prove, that in many cases it is the result of the company deciding that any migrations they were considering are either not justified or not practical in a meaningful timeframe and so they are looking to polish their existing apps. In some cases, there is a recognition that using modern RPG is going to be an essential part of finding replacement staff for their aging developers.” “We’ve particularly seen a number of companies with very large staffs,” says Gantner. “We teach two to three iterations of the same material to cover all the developers. For whatever reason, these companies allowed their applications to languish in a sort of life support maintenance mode for a long time. Perhaps there were thoughts they would move them to some wondrous new language/environment some day or maybe application modernization just didn’t get high enough on the priority list. I’m not sure. But it does seem that in our corner of the business, many shops–particularly some large ones–have decided that it’s time to breathe new life into those applications.” The increase in early registrations for the upcoming Summit, Gantner theorized, could be related to a subset of the IBM i community that chooses not to hire customized private training, but prefers to send one or several members of its IBM i staff to the Summit to learn skills and pass them on to other staff members after they complete the training. Not to be overlooked as another factor in the attendance bump at the Summit is the demise of the annual DevCon conference, a large IBM i application development technical event with attendance that hovered around 150 to 175 programmers in recent years. Wellesley Information Services, an IT publishing and training organization, was responsible for producing DevCon. It’s reasonable to believe that the absence of DevCon has boosted attendance to the Summit as companies that relied on that training opportunity look for alternatives. Regardless of where the attendance bump originates, there continues to be a skills shortage for IBM i shops, which is largely a reflection of an overall IT skills shortage that all companies are facing. IBM i shops that fail to develop the in-house skills will end up hiring those skills from consulting groups that include IBM, the IBM i value added resellers (VARs), and the IBM i vendor community. Decisions on which route to take are being made every day. For those investing in their in-house IT, the quality of education becomes an issue. Part of this equation is the instructor to student ratio, which the SiD organization keeps as a priority as attendance grows. Additional instructors already have been added to the teaching staff as a result of the pre-conference attendance surge. “The Summit is known for its smaller, more personalized, interactive learning environment,” Paris says. “That’s what makes it so different and fun–for all of us instructors, too. We would cap registration before compromising that community feeling.” A session listing for the RPG & DB2 Summit is available online. RELATED STORIES DevCon Technical Conference Is No More RPG & DB2 Summit Adds Analytics, BI To Agenda SQL Conference Puts Spotlight on IBM i RPG & DB2 Summit Picks Tipton for Keynote
|
