IT departments have COBOL Jobs available. There are over 200 billion lines of COBOL code supporting business applications. It is estimated that this number will grow at a rate of 5 million lines each year over the next five years. It is well established that companies cannot afford to rewrite or replace existing legacy COBOL programs with other Internet oriented languages. Because the annual number of COBOL programmers in North America will decrease by 13 percent annually, businesses will seek programmers to fill COBOL Jobs. COBOL isn't going away and COBOL Jobs and opportunities will be plentiful for those that have the required skill set.
COBOL Jobs in IT departments will be deal with transitioning legacy applications to Web services and e-commerce environments. The demand for COBOL Jobs by enterprises will require an infusion of programmers having a complete knowledge of COBOL as well as the needed skills to master these new technological platforms. New COBOL Jobs will demand interoperable skills associated with transitioning legacy code to the e-commerce model (i.e. Java, COM, and .NET technologies). The new generation of COBOL programmers seeking COBOL Jobs will be required to 'retool' their programming proficiency to meet the new skill set requirements.
A source of COBOL Jobs has been Mainframe business systems. These include applications developed in-house, application packages and systems managed by application service providers. Mainframes therefore are and will be a major core piece of IT infrastructure and a continuing source of COBOL Jobs. Consider the following basis for COBOL Jobs:
80% of all bank ATM transactions run through a CICS system
CICS transaction volume grew from 20 billion a day in 1998 to 30 billion a day in 2001
80% of all deployed applications over the next four years will include extensions to existing Business systems
