Top ten dying IT skills revealed

What was once considering cutting edge is fast out of date.

The top ten are

* Cobol
* non=relational DBMS
* non-IP networks
* cc:Mail
* ColdFusion
* C programming
* Power Builder
* Certified Netware Engineers
* PC network administrators
* OS/2

Cobol should have been on the scrap heap a long time ago, but was saved because of the Y2K fiasco. Some companies report that there is still some work out there for Cobol workers from outfits which have never bothered to upgrade to anything, but generally this is getting harder to find.

Non-relational DBMS such as IBM’s IMS and SAS Institute System 2000, and network DBMS, such as CA’s IDMS and Oracle DBMS, formerly the VAX DBMS, have been killed off by the relational DBMS approach. SQL databases such as DB2, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, now rule the roost and it is nearly impossible to get training in the old systems.

IBM’s Systems Network Architecture (SNA) is only ever seen in some banks and insurance firms having been largely killed off by TCP/IP and the Internet technologies.

And while cc:Mail was withdrawn in 2000, it is still supported, but email is mostly integrated these days and it became a white elephant.

Cold Fusion was hugely popular in the mid-1990s as the Web programming language of the future. It was killed off by Vole’s Active Server Pages and .Net, as well as Java, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP and other open-source languages.

Find a C programmer and you will find someone unemployed or re-training. While C++ and S Sharp are being used, no one wants the original.

Power Builder once used to be really in demand in the mid 1990s and was once even seen as a rival to Oracle. Since it was bought by Sybase it has moved to the bottom of the list of in-demand application development and platform skills. Pay is about the same as a Cobol programmer. It is still being used though with Power Builder 11 expected this year.

The number of Certified Netware Engineers has plummeted with even Novell losing interest in the network operating system. Companies still need engineers but the numbers are slacking off.