UK Job scene for a MAINFRAMES professional

[theroyale]

This might be of help to all those people with Mainframes experience who are planning to come to the UK to seek jobs on Tier-1:

I have been here since Sept 09 - six months now - and nothing has come through. And this with 1 year's previous UK experience (on a Tier-2). There are simply not enough Mainframe jobs available. A quick search on jobserve.co.uk for 'Mainframe OR COBOL' will give you about 10 jobs. While a search for 'SQL' or '.NET' or 'Java' or pretty much anything else will give you about 300 results!

And there are simply too many Mainframe people here looking for jobs - just this morning I spoke to agent regarding a Mainframe application I sent him, he had received 200 CVs for this role!

So what is happening - because of the CV overload - is that only those with specific vertical experience are being considered. A COBOL programming job in the Utilities sector is open only to those who have worked in this specific sector before, and so on. If you have worked in the Financial or Insurance sector, there is some hope (because London has lots of Finance jobs). If your vertical is something else (like for me in Healthcare), well tough nuts.

This isn't to discourage people from coming, but only to make you aware of the situation on the ground. I have been forced into "branching off" into SQL and re-jigging my CV that way - perhaps others should think of such things too.

Cheers, and good luck to everyone.

[JACKY123]

You are very TRUE on the results from Jobserve and No reply from anybody.

How about jobs in Project Management/Business Analyst ?

what is advice to tweak the CV for other technologies ?

which is more prospective area ?

keep posting useful info like this.

Thanks

[T1_Mainframe]

No MF jobs as all of them are outsourced to India.