Get IT students in front of an IBM Z!
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When discussing IBM Z (Mainframes) with customers, an often heard observation is that skills on the platform is an issue. It is therefor good to know that #HoGe(Hoge School, Gent) a University College in Belgium, has a mainframe curriculum.
When I first heard about it, by bumping into them on a GSE Netherlands event some years ago, I picked up the challenge to get those student to the IBM Client Engineering Center in Montpellier, France. This IBM location has been known for their IBM Z knowledge for many years. They also host a couple of IBM Z machines for benchmarking, testing, education, exploration and demonstration.
While that first trip was back in 2018, it didn’t find a successor for a couple of reasons, one of them being COVID.
Up until last week.
Together with my partners in crime Joris Mertens, Andy Armstrong and coordinator Jean-Philippe Durney we sat together with the two IBM Z curriculum drivers Leendert Blondeel and Chantal Teerlinck to prepare an agenda. Last week we went to the IBM Montepllier facilities with the students to have a full day mainframe talk, show, demo on IBM Z.
Andy Armstrong was showing the students how easy it was to run workload on IBM Z leveraging z/OS Container Extensions and demoed live how to quickly set it up.
We had renowned speakers like Gerard Laumay talking about the hardware side of Z and also showed the students into the datacenter where they good feel and touch IBM Z machines. Gerard explained how the frames were setup and connected.
Philippe Bruschet from the IBM Center shared, with his many years of experience, how to configure a system from the bottom up, how to configure it and what happens at an Initial Program Load (IPL) when a machine is powered on for the very first time.
As Michiel Hasker from IBM Marketing Europe was available we also had him talk about the position of the mainframe.
It was not only listening in, the students could get their hands dirty on a short workshop Joris created.
We also invited Thomas Parmentier a mainframe software engineer at #colruytgroup who was so kind to join us and gave insights on how Colruyt used their IBM Z system. Very interesting!
In short, it was a very fruitful day, well organised by the IBM Montepelier facilities, like always, and I hope students like Jorn Lammens, Sybren Van Den Eeckhout, Sander Verbraekel, Stef Van der Straeten, Arne Govaerts, Jordi Dewit, Sander Stroobandt, Lieven VanDen Berghe had a great day as well.
The only thing that could be enhanced the next time is to have Frank DeGilio and Luisa Martinez on stage as well!
If you read this and think “Could we swing this in my country or university?” The answer is -probably- “Yes we can!”, Send me a DM!
