Skills Displaces Cybersecurity As Top Concern For IBM i Shops

February 2, 2026 Alex Woodie

Well, it was bound to happen eventually. After nine straight years as the top concern in the IBM i community, cybersecurity has finally fallen out of the number one position in Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey. Taking its place atop the closely watched survey is IBM i skills, an issue that has been lurking in the background but now must be considered a priority for IBM i leaders.

Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey provides a broad barometer on what’s going on with the IBM i community. One of the most closely watched questions in the survey, now in its 12th year, is the Top Concerns component, where Fortra asks survey-takers to list their top five concerns. In every year since 2017, security has been marked down more than any other concern. But now, IBM i skills has finally overtaken it.

IBM i skills was marked as a top concern by 69 percent of the 315 people who took the 2026 IBM i Marketplace i survey, which Fortra conducted in late 2025. That’s up significantly from 60 percent in the 2025 survey, when it was the number two top concern. Going back to 2020, IBM i skills was consistently in the top five, with scores of 65 percent (2024), 54 percent (2023), 53 percent (2022), 46 percent (2021), and 45 percent (2020). Before then, it ranged from 49 percent (2019) to 38 percent (2016).

Source for data: Fortra IBM i Marketplace Surveys

An increase of 24 percentage points over seven years is a solid indicator that something is going on. Organizations clearly have been struggling for a while to find replacements for their IBM i programmers, administrators, and operators, and its emergence as the number one concern really should be viewed as a confirmation of what many in the industry have known and been talking about for years.

Anecdotal evidence suggests the IBM i platform is disproportionately represented by members of the Baby Boomers generation, which is defined as those who were born between 1946 and 1964. That means the youngest Boomers are now 62 years old, which means they’re eligible to receive Social Security benefits. The tide of retirements likely will accelerate in the years to come, as people who delayed their retirements to get bigger Social Security checks eventually are forced to take it.

IBM i chief architect Steve Will said he was not surprised by the news. “This community has always been beset by this issue, that IBM skills are harder to find than other skills,” Will said during Fortra’s webinar discussing the 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey results. “We know that, right? That’s the way it is. It’s one of the reasons we try to make things as easy as we possibly can on this platform.”

Will noted that the looming skills issue is one of the drivers behind Project Bob, the agentic AI technology that is currently under development by IBM. “It’s relatively easy to take a computer professional and teach them how to do things on IBM i,” Will said. “That will really help this skill challenge issue. It’ll probably remain a challenge if, what you really want is somebody with 10 years of experience on the platform. But if what you’re looking for is a tool that can help anybody who’s smart and wants to learn it, to work with the platform, well, we’ll have those for you.”

There has been a concerted effort by the IBM i community to attract younger people to the platform. This has borne some fruit, as the past two POWERUp conferences by COMMON have looked a little less like a daytrip from a retirement home and a little more like an American college on spring break. There are good, solid jobs to be had working on the IBM i platform, and the word is getting out, albeit not as quickly as some would like.

Source: Fortra 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey

The IBM i skills issue – which is really a personnel issue – has several offshoots. With few, if any, four-year universities offering IBM i education, community colleges and technical schools have stepped in to provide some education. Training on IBM i skills can also be had from private schools like Jim Buck’s imPOWER Technologies, Dan Riehl’s The 400 School, and Bill Hansen’s Manta Technologies. A shift to open development languages, like Node.JS, PHP, and Python, along with open frameworks and databases, has widened the pool of developers who can create applications that run on IBM i.

As the IBM i skills issue has come to the forefront, security concerns have receded. After peaking at an all-time high of 79 percent in the 2024 survey, security (or cybersecurity as Fortra terms it) dropped to 77 percent in 2025 before dipping dramatically to 64 percent for the 2026 survey, putting it just ahead of application modernization at 62 percent.

“It’s really kind of good to see it not be number one,” Tom Huntington, Fortra’s senior vice president of technical services, said on the Fortra webinar. “It means that people are addressing, or feel like they’ve addressed, cybersecurity on IBM i.”

That’s not to minimize the very real security concerns that still exists on IBM i, Huntington said. IBM i professionals should still be paying attention to exit point, security logs, secure file transfer, ransomware, viruses, and multi-factor authentication, he said.

“You can’t just put your head in the sand and assume everything’s going to be okay, because these challenges and the threats are changing,” he said. “But it’s good to see customers have adopted these technologies.”

See the links below to access Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey.

You can access Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey results here. You can watch a replay of the webinar here.

Receding concerns about security also validate the investment that IBM made in multi-factor authentication (MFA), especially the built-in MFA facility that IBM included in IBM i 7.6 last year. “Security is one of our biggest investment areas,” Kris Whitney, the chief engineer for IBM i development, said on the Fortra webinar.

Whitney highlighted emerging areas of concern, such as post-quantum cryptography and the need to safeguard copies of data. “A lot of customers have embraced that concept of air gapped copies of your data, and to be able to recover from them. I think that’s a great thing, and now they’re building automation, around recovery of that, to get back up. IBM is set up nicely to do that.”

Concern about application modernization increased slightly in late 2025, with a 62 percent share in the top concerns question. High availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) dropped to 47 percent, its lowest level since 2017, while concerns about regulation and compliance ticked up a percentage point to 39 percent.

Artificial intelligence, generative AI, and machine learning surged to 42 percent, number five on the list. That’s an increase of 12 percentage points over one year, and a whopping 24 percentage point increase over the past two years. When Fortra added AI to the list of concerns in 2021, it was the lowest-ranked concern, with just a 7 percent share.

As AI technology improves, it’s going to continue marching to the left as it helps address other concerns, IT Jungle president Timothy Prickett Morgan said on the Fortra webinar.

“Looking forward, I have no problem believing that next year AI will be number three and it will be number two after that,” he said. “To a great extent, I think we’re going to end up with a much better set of AI tools that can help us address the skill shortage and modernizing applications. This all feeds together in a virtuous cycle.”

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