One piece of advice I can give to someone new to the IBM Z organization is to try and become a Go-To Person for something. There are always new tools and applications and updates being developed on the mainframe platform, and the pace of development is so quick that no one person IBMer or Customer can keep up-to-date on all of it. When they do need to hear about the latest and greatest on a technology, they often turn to a Go-To Person.

Usually being a Go-To Person involves an official title like 'SME' or 'Advocate,' but even your run-of-the-mill Tech Specialist can become the Go-To for something if they so choose. I'm the Go-To, or at least working to be a Go-To, for watsonx Assistant for Z for example. Despite IBM's best efforts, I encounter almost daily mainframe professionals both IBM and External who have never heard of wxa4z, or never seen wxa4z, or never put hands on wxa4z, so there is constant need to provide demos, workshops, pricing, or just information, and this demand can often exceed the capacity of the official SMEs, hence the value of being able to turn to a Go-To.

So I advise you to speak to your mentor, your manager, your immediate colleagues, and uncover a technology that's lacking in Go-To people, very likely something that's just been released, so no one's an expert on it except the person who invented it. Today it's wxa4z but tomorrow it could be something completely different and I'm going to need a Go-To for it, and my teammates will need a Go-To for it, and my customers will need a Go-To for it. Why not you?