In the United States, 59,000 computer science students graduate college every year while 10,000 baby boomers retire and leave the work force every day. There just aren't enough students to back-fill the roles that the baby boomer generation leaves behind. In 2020, there were more than 84,000 mainframe positions open and not enough practitioners to fill them.

We invite you to our Educator Hub session to learn all about the IBM Z mainframe, the ecosystem that depends on it, and why this technology matters.

About the speaker

Marc I. Smith is a mainframe educational programs consultant with ProTech Training. He spent 28 of 33 years at IBM as a member of the IBM Z (mainframe) community. He began his mainframe career working with VM/HPO and VM/ESA development before moving on to planning and managing VM Early Support Programs (ESPs), marketing z/VSE and z/VM until moving into marketing and channel enablement positions within the IBM Z hardware family. Marc was a Z Academic Initiative University Ambassador in Texas, working to recruit colleges into the program and started bringing students to SHARE and other IBM conferences to see the mainframe and meet people who work on/around the mainframe. He is also one of the IBM team members who brought Destination z into existence and managed the online community until his retirement from IBM in 2012. He was announced as an IBM Z Champion for 2018, 2019 and again in 2020.