How AI and a community come together to boost mainframe skills
The mainframe skills crisis is real. As veteran systems experts leave the workforce to enjoy retirement, companies are scrambling to fill the knowledge and experience void they’re leaving behind.
For some infrastructure leaders, this talent exodus can represent a serious threat to business operations and innovation capabilities. However, for those experts and employers active in the IBM Z® community, something truly special is happening.
The worldwide community of the New to Z professional user group offers peer-driven skills building while agentic AI solutions are driving productivity, efficiency and opportunity within organizations’ IT infrastructures.
Available skills programs , community expertise and agentic AI together are creating a bridge for preexisting knowledge to find its way to the new generation of professionals.
Even more so, this combination of skilling up workers and using AI solutions transforms operations and reduces workloads. As a result, today’s mainframe workers can focus on innovation—not just routine work and checking off boxes. Let’s explore how these approaches are actively contributing to a skills gap solution.
The IBM Z community is over 100,000 members strong with more than 35% of these professionals being new to the platform. Within the IBM Z community, a movement has begun to establish a place for peers from all levels of mainframe expertise.
In this space, members can learn new skills from each other through live events, learning opportunities and a strong sense of camaraderie that extends beyond the parameters of meetings.
And mainframers are turning out. The New to Z professional user group’s global chapter program has surged in growth with over 30 chapters across 18 countries. As chapters continue to launch around the world, a vibrant network of peers is promoting valuable skill development—including generating and optimizing code and much more.
These groups welcome early-tenure mainframe professionals looking to further their careers with deeper technical skills and connections to peers and resources—and connect with seasoned experts and mentors.
The leaders of these chapters are helping participants build or deepen skills, learn new technology such as AI-centric capabilities, understand pain points and grow their career.
From Sydney to New York, Brazil to Bangalore, the community is establishing relationships around the world and learning through:
- Mentorships
- Access to experts
- Technical talks
- Gamified learning experiences
- Networking with other professionals of all tenure levels
By leveraging available apprenticeship programs and the IBM Z Global Skills Accelerator Program, many members of these groups are undergoing significant career shifts. They’re shifting from nontechnical roles to becoming mainframe administrators and developers with the skills and knowledge that they’ve gained. “Having no technical degree and wanting to get into the IT industry, I had struggled for a year and a half to get a job in this industry,” said Galina Valinva, a former London-based bartender turned mainframer.
But leveling up education and skills for IBM Z goes beyond our thriving community. It works in tandem with AI-powered productivity tools, creating a multilevel approach to strengthening proficiency and accelerating knowledge depth—all while significantly reducing the time for direct mentoring by experienced team members.
While our professional groups are helping build and establish skills, the powerful AI assistant tools available for IBM Z are helping accelerate knowledge depth and increase productivity.
For example, AI can function on behalf of several “agents,” capturing, consolidating and incorporating institutional knowledge to construct intelligent systems with minimal human oversight.
These agentic AI tools can be swiftly deployed across numerous applications, from sophisticated AI models across diverse environments, to straightforward search tools that facilitate quick access to pertinent information derived from extensive trusted sources and databases.
IBM® watsonx Code Assistant® for Z technology—a generative AI (gen AI) solution for accelerating the mainframe application lifecycle and streamlining modernization—is a way to help employees increase efficiency and impact with AI. With this tool, developers can:
- Leverage a fine-tuned large language model (LLM) to improve code understanding, quality and accuracy.
- Refactor selected elements of an application automatically.
- Modernize and optimize applications whether you want to understand, manage, transform or build COBOL applications from scratch.
- Transform coding workflows across Java, Python, C, C++, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript and more languages with gen AI.
IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z is quickly becoming a developer’s greatest companion as it’s tailored to mainframe environments and understands both the context and content specific to their code. This understanding allows it to suggest complete lines or blocks of code, helping developers write, read and debug with remarkable speed and accuracy.
One IBM Z client saw up to a 79% reduction in the time required for their developers to understand their existing complex applications, in some cases reducing the time from 24 to approximately 5 hours.
Operation professionals and administrators are also benefiting from the power of AI with IBM watsonx Assistant for Z. For professionals new to Z, it’s like having a mentor in their pocket, while for experienced mainframers it enables automation of routine tasks to free up time for mentoring or new projects.
These tools are a game-changer in addressing the skills and knowledge gap. Many mainframe experts struggle with their existing workloads—let alone taking on new projects or aiding in the upskilling of newer employees.
The capacity of agentic AI to capture and build upon existing knowledge plays a vital role in addressing the global skills gap because professionals new to Z can accelerate their time to productivity and knowledge depth, while experts free up their bandwidth to take on more mentees and growth projects. By capitalizing on existing institutional knowledge, agents can elevate overall productivity to new heights.
The challenges of onboarding and upskilling in the mainframe space are real—but so are the opportunities and solutions. The rise of intelligent, agentic AI tools, comprehensive skills programs, and a thriving global community is helping address these challenges. The IBM Z workforce is better equipped than ever to bridge the skills gap and empower the next generation of mainframe talent.
Learn more about IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z and IBM watsonx Assistant for Z