IBM to the rescue of US social security, launches free COBOL course

Robert Sole 13 April 2020

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There are many critical systems in the world that are based on more than obsolete software or programming languages that no one uses anymore. They are usually critical systems they can't stop and updating them would cost a lot of time and money. But when things go wrong, reality hits hard. This is weighing on the United States, where they are looking for COBOL programmers to maintain their social security systems for the unemployed.

America's unemployed social security systems are based on a 50-year-old programming language. With the current volume of unemployed due to the coronavirus crisis, important problems are appearing on the network. But the most critical is that there are no qualified personnel in COBOL, since it is 50 years old and more than obsolete.

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Nobody knows COBOL and that is a problem in the United States

COBOL is a very old programming language that is no longer studied. The problem with this language is that it is very old and in colleges and universities it is not given. It should be noted that this language is still present in critical infrastructures around the world, which aggravates the problem. In fact, IBM has had to mobilize in a hurry to train people in this language.

IBM has had to design a Open Source course at full speed to teach COBOL basics to programmers. This course has been designed in collaboration with IBM clients and a higher education center. It is intended to offer high-level COBOL training through the use of VSCode.

The course will be published this week on the Coursera platform with videos, labs and materials at no cost. Additionally, IBM will offer this training on its own training platform.

IBM has also announced a portal to connect COBOL programmers with companies that need qualified personnel. COBOL veterans, volunteers, or students are offered to find work or help out. There is also a technical forum for experienced programmers in this language who give free advice during the coronavirus pandemic.

Open Mainframe Project is a project of IBM and Linux also to offer solutions in COBOL. Within this project are companies such as SUSE, Rocket Software, Phoenix Software or Broadcom, which also collaborate.

It's not easy, but it's still time to update critical systems instead of desperately searching for patches. Something like this happened with bank tellers a few years ago, where many used Windows 95 or Windows 98, despite being more than obsolete.