Looking for advice

[Suma Narayan]

I am an experienced Mainframe professional with over 9 years in the industry. I passed SCJP exam in june 2000 with the hope to use my COBOL experience and my newly acquired java knowledge to further my career. I was however unsuccessful and have been out of the industry since 1999 for personal reasons.
Since I've been out of the industry for a while, I'm wondering if my skill sets are adequate in the present market conditions. Could someone advice me on the skill sets I may need to acquire to be in a position to work from home on a part time basis.

[Mark Howard]

Hi Suma
You may want to have a look at this thread in the Jobs Discussion forum.
The future does not appear to be all that rosy for us 'aging' IT bods

[Suma Narayan]

Hi Mark,
Thanks for the reply. I have been reading the topics in this forum regularly. I agree with you that the job market is not all that good right now. But, I am hoping that there will be more opportunities for experienced professionals like us in future. I know that with my present skill set and a gap of almost four years, it is difficult to find a suitable job. Hence I would like to make best use of the time available to me and add on to my skills. So, I would appreciate if you or anyone else can tell me about different sets of skill I can learn. I have programming experience in COBOL, DB2, CICS, other Mainframe utilities, knowledge of Project management and passed SCJP.
Thanks, once again.

[Mark Herschberg]

What was the reason for the 4 year experience gap (which is the first question you'll get during an interviews)?
--Mark

[frank davis]

Originally posted by Suma Narayan:
I am an experienced Mainframe professional with over 9 years in the industry. I passed SCJP exam in june 2000 with the hope to use my COBOL experience and my newly acquired java knowledge to further my career.

Some State, City, and County governments still seem to be using COBOL. You may want to check Federal govt positions as well. Banking (SouthTrust, etc)and banking software companies still use COBOL somewhat. I work at a School Board and they use COBOL on a mainframe also. I also worked for a company called PaySys that handled credit card billing. Check out the financial industry, First Data Inc, FDR, etc.