Clay, 
Just out of curiosity can you share your background so we know where you're coming from or are you just out of school ?
Regards,
Richard Schoen
RJS Software Systems Inc.
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message: 6
date: Tue, 14 May 2013 08:06:01 -0700
from: Clay B Carley <cbc@xxxxxxxxx>
subject: Recommendations for a newcomer?
Being new to midrange systems, I'm attempting to pick up skills that 
will be useful for me in the future, in hopes to get a job working with 
them.  Reading articles that say things like COBOL is uncool, and RPG is 
worse isn't really giving me hope for a future working with a midrange 
system though.
Is it going to be worth my time to learn things like CL, COBOL, and RPG 
now?  Or are they fading away?  It would be pretty sad to finally become 
proficient with these languages, only to find out that they are dead and 
replaced with <blah> instead.
What would you recommend a newcomer focus on (aside from system operations)?
Reading Rob's message from last week regarding "20 years of experience, 
versus one year of experience repeated 20 times" looks like a pretty 
good starting place I suppose.  I'm really trying to look at where we're 
going to be in the years to come, not necessarily tomorrow.
Thanks for any suggestions,
Clay Carley
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