Keep The IBM i Youth Movement Going With More Training, Better Tools
June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie
Nobody is going to mistake an IBM i conference for a college campus anytime soon. But if the recent POWERUp 2025 conference at Disneyland was any indication, there is a definite trend toward younger professionals working on the platform. While the IBM i youth movement is real, companies will benefit from some simple ways to attract and retain these new IBM i professionals.
IBM is still working to get IBM i content back into four-year universities through the Power Skills Academy, which has been a struggle. Colleges are reluctant to invest in building a curriculum based on technologies that they perceive as being older and not as relevant to the job prospects of their students as other technologies. That’s a shame, especially considering the volume of System Z curriculum currently in four-year schools. The mainframe and IBM i live in the same Zip Code when it comes to age and business relevance, so it’s a bit disconcerting that progress has been so hard to come by.
In any case, the lack of graduates coming out of four-year college programs with job-ready IBM i skills should not be of great concern to IBM i shops, who have the necessary resources to train existing workers on IBM i. That’s something that companies used to do all the time but somehow forgot how to do, said Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group, a provider of IBM i technical services as well as a PHP distribution for IBM i.
“They used to do it,” Seiden said. “When I started, they learned on the job. I was taught through some cassette tapes. Now I think people have come to realize they have to create the next generation again.”
The secret for IBM i shops who are looking for the next generation of RPG programmers is not to look for RPG programmers. While that might sound like some piece of “sound of one-hand clapping” Confucian wisdom, it actually is quite straight forward, according to Seiden.
“Companies realize they have to make their own RPG programmers, and they can,” Seiden told IT Jungle at the POWERUp conference. “It’s very practical to do it that way. It’s not a problem. These young people are very quick. They can make their own. They don’t call them RPG developers. They’re React, Node, PHP, and Java developers. They’re good developers and they can learn different skills. They may even enjoy doing more than one kind of development.”
There are many resources available on the market for upskilling an existing developer with IBM i and RPG skills. COMMON is the world’s largest IBM i user group, and its educational offerings are world-class. In addition to the annual POWERUp and NAViGATOR conferences in the spring and fall, COMMON offers training boot camps, skill certifications, and an enormous library of educational content, which Common Europe licenses to use with its members across the pond.
There is also imPOWER Technologies, Jim Buck’s private IBM i school, which offers mentored online classes in RPG development, IBM i concepts and operations, and modular programming. Another place for IBM i education is The 400 School, owned by longtime IBM i expert Dan Riehl, which offers guided courses on RPG, COBOL, and CL programming and IBM i operations. You can also get professional IBM i education from Bill Hanson’s longtime company Manta Technologies, which offers courses on IBM i programming and operations topics as well as other topics, like security, using Navigator, and working with the database.
These private IBM i educational and training companies can definitely get your existing programmers up-to-speed on IBM i development. But the fact is, your next RPG programmer might not even be a programmer. The first job for Buck, who grew up on a farm, was at a refrigerator maker where on any given day he might be assembling a new fridge or feeding punch cards into an old Amdahl mainframe.
IBM i shops today should take a hard look at where they are and where they want to go in terms of IBM i professional development, because the old ways of working don’t work anymore, Buck said.
“They really had it easy for years,” Buck said of IBM i professionals. “It was just, ‘I’ll rob my neighbor down the road. I’ll steal his RPG programmer.’ We just kind of ran in circles. And every time we jumped ship, we’d make more money. And now those guys are going away, and the managers are going, well, what are we going to do?”
The CIOs and IT managers still want a plug-and-play RPG programmer. But those folks practically are all gone. Instead, they should look to promote from within, said Michele Lyons, the chief operating officer of imPOWER Technologies and Buck’s business partner.
“They can find someone in the warehouse, they can find an accountant, they can find somebody who’s interested,” Lyons said. “Or they can find a kid out of school that has mad skills or somebody in their company who knows the business, and just teach them RPG like you would anything else.”
Instead of obsessing over the (lack of) IBM i skills on resumes and CVs, prospective employers should look at the other intangibles. Select the best candidate from your pool of candidates, and then train them with the specific skills they will need to do their jobs. Hire someone who is enthusiastic about learning and who has good communication skills, Lyons said, and they could stay for a long time.
Seiden reiterated that last point about recruiting new talent. “Don’t be too picky,” he said. “Don’t say I want an IBM i developer. Say I want a good developer, and choose people based on personality, drive, initiative, and being able to work as a group.”
Buck and Lyons offered one more piece of advice: Ditch the System/36-era code and System/36-era tools. Nobody wants to work in fix-format RPG III and SEU. If your IBM i environment has no plans to move beyond these dinosaur-era technologies, then your organization may not deserve a young professional who is eager to learn and will turn into a valuable asset.
“If they want them to come in and work on fixed-format or RPG III, they’re not gonna, you know what I mean?” Lyons said. “The companies have to be willing to modernize.”
Buck shared the story of a recent imPOWER graduate went off to work at a food distribution company in the Great Plains, only to discover that 80 percent of the code was from the Carter Administration. “He says, ‘This stuff is terrible,’” Buck said.
But after licensing a code conversion tool, the recent imPOWER grad and his assistant set to work modernizing the RPG. “The two of them have converted all their code, just the two of them,” Buck said. “They did it in a year, besides running the day-to-day stuff. So it’s doable. It’s just you have to decide, well, we’re going to do that.”
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