COBOL Programmer, JCL, VSAM

Calling all COBOL Programmers
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  • Name: Barbara Venturi
  • COBOL/Mainframe Experience: IBM Mainframe consultant/programmer/trainer for environments requiring expertise in COBOL, JCL, MVS Utilitites, VSAM, TSO, and CICS in IBM Mainframe environments. 1980-2005 Independent Consultant and President of Halcyon Associates consulting/in-house training for programmers/analysts in large IBM Mainframe systems; private in-house training to transition programmers from non-IBM environments to COBOL/ TSO, VSAM, JCL, testing and debugging in IBM VMS environments for large corporations, Federal and State governments. Besides tailored training for individual organizations, I also presented public seminars for a decade at North Carolina State University McKimmon Center, Raleigh NC, in COBOL, VSAM, JCL, CICS, TSO and MVS Utilities. 1973-1980 Director of Education at Chubb Insurance’s Institute for Computer Technology, Short Hills, NJ.
  • Location: (North Carolina, can be mobile or telecommute)
  • Availability: (Full or part-time for programming, part-time for training)
  • Availability Type: (Available to Hire)
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Hi. I saw this post and am interested. I was trained in COBOL in 1976 by the US Army. Worked as a COBOL programmer for 10+ years then went onto be a DBA in multiple products including DB2, IDMS, SQL/DS, Oracle then went into IT management. My COBOL is rusty and would need refreshing to get back up to speed. I currently live in the Wilmington, NC area and am retired and considering a part time or temp gig.
Thanks, Dan Dodge
lifesgood50@gmail.com

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Hi Dan,

Well, I put my stuff out there in case a business or government agency needed a programmer (me) or someone to do training who has virtually a lifetime of training thousands of programmers for an IBM Mainframe environments, which operate “virtually” in most situations these days. Stuff was done for Y2K, patches mostly, and now, with this pandemic, a lot of that old code, especially in governments and financial institutions need to efficiently react in real-time, not “sometime”. There are two generations of programmers out there who couldn’t find their way through COBOL code with a flashlight or even add a simple alphanumeric field to a record definition, let alone numerics. I’d be happy to do some programming or put together some training materials that focus on the specific processing needs of an organization.

I had not considered doing individual tutoring/training. I’d suggest you get your resume out there because each organization will need application-specific programmers. There are books and some websites where people “talk” COBOL" which would be a good refresher. That might be your best bet. I’m not set up to do any sort of personal training, just on-site groups needing specifics about record definitions, code updates, workflow control, and how not to screw things up that have “worked” for low these many decades.

Sorry, I don’t think I can help you. Get hired, they’ll train you on the specifics of their environment.

Good luck,

Barb

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Thanks Barb! I started some refresher online courses. Felt
good to see code again. I used to be pretty good at Report
Writer too.

Good Luck!

Dan