A New Model for Enterprise System Education

An ongoing concern in the Enterprise Systems community is the “skills gap” between the need for Enterprise Systems skills (created by the retirement of aging mainframers) and the number of college students who are exposed to Enterprise Systems Technology in their degree programs. The Master the Mainframe Contest has done an excellent job of exposing a new generation to the mainframe, but the number or degree programs that include this technology is alarmingly few. The numbers generated by these programs is clearly inadequate to meet the need.  We have developed an online mainframe curriculum that can be deployed by any campus, even those with no in-house mainframe expertise (usually an impediment for beginning an Enterprise Systems academic program).   This presentation will demonstrate a model program that allows universities who have an interest in Enterprise Systems but no experience in teaching it that allows their students take classes online for degree credit at their home University (as far as we know this has not been done at the undergraduate level).  The program is currently implemented at two universities, with a third scheduled to use it in fall 2015.  The model not only allows more students to learn about the mainframe, but also makes them part of the mainframe culture.  We feel this is the best model yet devised to dramatically expand the Enterprise Systems footprint among college students and offers a clear path toward a solution of the skills gap.

Tracks: Application Development and zNextGen