Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Hi,

If I would like to see a strong carrer in mainframes what certification would you recommend for mainframes? Please share your thoughts.

I think you need to spend some time with yourself to come up with an answer for that question. Mainframe had been alive for commercial purposes since '60s and it has evolved in many different directions since then. That makes it all more tough to answer and suggest you a single certificate in to it.

There is a huge, if not infinite, list of certification product category from IBM. You need to choose an area of your choice and then take it from there. Once you've identified what area you want to get in to it'll be easy for us to help you. This is a link to IBM Professional Certification Program which lists the certification by Product.

One more thing - if you are new to all this, I think spending some time on the course material for Test P4070-005: IBM System z and z/OS Fundamentals Mastery might interest you.

Thanks Anuj.

I want to do a certificate which can help me in my career growth.

I think you need to spend some time figuring out your career goals first. Mainframe programming includes a number of specialties (applications programmer, systems programmer, operator being three of them) and you generally will not specialize in more than one of them. Each specialty, in turn, has a number of possible ways to go (systems programmers, for example, can be z?OS, RACF, DB2, MQ, CICS, network specialists -- among others). If your career is focused upon applications programming, then getting certification as a RACF systems programmer would not benefit your career.

Furthermore, I suspect you are giving certification more importance than it should have. Certification, in the real world, merely indicates someone can pass the test(s) -- most sites want to see evidence that the applicant (whether or not certified) can actually do the tasks involved in the job. For equally qualified applicants a certification may provide a little extra in the hiring process but rarely does this occur.

Will a cloud or Big data certificate along with mainframe knowledge be a good combination for future job requirements?

It couldn't hurt.  Mainframes were dealing with big data long before "big data" became a fad -- the newer DS8800 disk subsystem supports up to 2.3 petabytes (that is 2,300,000 gigabytes) in a single unit.  And IBM is pushing cloud computing heavily so they see a future with cloud and mainframes co-existing, certainly.  But a lot depends upon you and what you are interested in.

Thanks!

Big-data is fad but they have a long list of tools now which are way different than mainframes and it all sound like a very good effort to learn it all. But thanks for your words.

Googling ibm big data returns 29,700,000 hits so I don't think you can say big data is only for non-mainframes.  There might be some effort moving the data to the mainframe, but analytical systems on the mainframe are quite good at processing massive amounts of data.  And unless you think social media is a fad that's going away some day, you can't really call big data a fad.  There are a lot of companies looking to use social media data in various ways.

Thanks.... i'll come back with some more research.