[bartread]

A number of people, I think in the "COBOL Cowboys" discussion, on HN have pointed out that it's not learning COBOL that's the issue. The language is the easy part. The real problem is learning the mainframe systems and concepts, and especially gaining meaningful experience with them. Emulators are available in some cases but back in the day all this stuff was proprietary, and doesn't follow the familar UNIX-a-like mould of many modern OSes. (It goes without saying they're nothing like Windows, either.)

EDIT: I think this is the COBOL Covboys discussion I referred to above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14083214

[wilsonnb]

There's an emulator called Hercules that can run z/OS, OS/390, or MVS. The hard part is getting a copy of a recent version of the OS. Luckily, z/OS takes backwards compatibility very seriously so an older version won't be THAT different from a newer one for a beginner.

A lot of the big mainframe software companies like CA Technologies, Rocket Software, or BMC hire people with no mainframe experience (often straight out of college) and then train them.

If you're willing to pay for it, IBM offers classes in Dallas, TX for beginners as well. They are not cheap.

Marist College (located in New York, I think) also offers some z/OS certificates and classes. Unfortunately, I don't think they are online. I could be wrong about that though. http://idcp.marist.edu/enterprisesystemseducation/zosprogram...

[calt]

Yes. I agree with this. Having command line and interactive terminal experience and actually programming your environment the more fundamental skill to have on mainframes.

[ams6110]

I don't know -- It's been decades since I wrote any COBOL, and at the time I was pretty fresh out of a unix-centric undergrad environment. I was at home in emacs and the shell command line and familiar with unix utilities, but the mainframe was just another planet entirely. None of that experience really translated.