In Part 1 of this video webinar series, guest speakers talk with the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Programming Course Technical Steering Committee (TSC) about using the course in their company to train new application developers.

Whether you're new to COBOL or an advanced learner, this webinar brings together industry leaders to discuss the value of the COBOL Programming Course from the Open Mainframe Project. The course provides modern tooling (VS Code, Zowe, IBM Z Open Editor, Code4z Extension Pack, and more) to enhance the learning experience. It also covers more advanced topics like dynamic-length items, multithreading, programming tuning, and more -- all with hands-on labs to help support the learning.

Rune Christensen is a Senior Software Developer at Bankdata, a company that supplies back-office and front-office applications to nine different banks in Denmark. Bankdata, which has 130,000 COBOL programs and 95 million lines of COBOL code in their codebase, uses this programming course in a decentralized way. They have departments and teams with senior people in charge of on-boarding new employees, and this course is integral to that process. In this webinar, members of the COBOL Programming Course Technical Steering Committee (TSC) talk to Rune and Simon Mikkelsen, a new employee of Bankdata, on their thoughts about COBOL and enhancements to the course.

Simon, who is new to COBOL but has many years of experience in Java, says the course clearly explains the COBOL language and tooling. He likes that this course focuses on Visual Studio, which is free and easy to download. He recommends this course to his colleagues and associates who are looking to learn COBOL.

Rune says they encapsulate the CICS interface from the developers so they can focus on learning and using COBOL. He is excited about this course and has a wish list of enhancements for the TSC team to make it even better. These suggestions include samples of XML, JSON passing and generating, calling sub programs and linkages, copybooks, and more.

Check out this COBOL Programming Course Q1 webinar with Rune, Simon, and members of the TSC.

Ready to start your COBOL journey? Dive into the COBOL Programming Course now!

This course is also available on the IBM Digital Learning Platform and Coursera.

Related resources:

Interested in COBOL? Check out the COBOL Programming Course from the Open Mainframe Project

Interested in COBOL? Check out the COBOL Programming Course from the Open Mainframe Project