There are between 10 and 30 active RPG programmer openings in the United States at any given time. That figure comes from Bob Langieri, president of Excel Technical, one of the few recruiting firms that still specialize in IBM i talent. Compare it to thousands of comparable openings for C# and Java developers, and the scale of the problem becomes clear immediately.
The 2026 Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey, which drew 315 respondents from across the IBM i community, found that 69% now cite IBM i skills as their top concern — surpassing cybersecurity for the first time in nine years.
This article sets out four realistic options for IBM i shops facing that pressure, with an honest assessment of what each one requires.
The IBM i Structural Shortage
The talent pool for IBM i specialists has been shrinking for nearly a decade, and the structural reasons behind it aren’t changing.
A 2025 Procern analysis found that over 72% of IBM i developers are over 50, with 35.8% already 60 or older. Approximately 30% percent of senior RPG developers have retired over the past 10-15 years, and most who remain are between 60 and 70.
There is no large-scale replacement pipeline currently emerging for IBM i talent.
The TIOBE language popularity index, which tracks developer activity and search volume across hundreds of languages, places RPG well outside the mainstream language rankings. It is not attracting new learners at any scale that would move the market within the next decade.
The professionals who built and maintained the IBM i ecosystem are aging out, and the formal educational infrastructure to train their replacements does not exist.
This applies equally to RPG, CL, and COBOL. All three languages are deeply embedded in IBM i production environments and face the same demographic cliff.
COBOL in particular remains actively used in IBM i shops running custom business applications, often with no more succession depth than the RPG environments alongside them.
The hiring problem is also partially self-inflicted.
Shops posting for “senior RPG developer with Python and Java experience” are compounding the scarcity. Langieri reports that requirements like these surface one to three viable candidates nationally. Add a salary ceiling or a relocation requirement, and you end up at zero.
Four Realistic Options for IBM i Shops Facing the Talent Shortage
The obvious first step for many companies is simply to hire directly. Unfortunately, with 10-30 candidates in the national pool for your role, this is not a viable long-term strategy.
The next step is working with a managed services provider. Depending on who you work with, they should handle most IBM i operations.
That being said, a generalist managed services provider does not do deep RPG work or ERP configuration.
The 20-year-old BPCS customization that controls how your warehouse allocates inventory requires someone who understands both IBM i and your business.
That’s why it is so important to choose the right ERP managed services provider rather than the cheapest, quickest one.
The last and most promising approach is the hire-and-train model. Training vendors, including imPOWER Technologies, The 400 School, and Manta Technologies, are active, and IBM has started hiring younger developers at its Rochester lab based on aptitude rather than platform experience.
But hire-and-train has three hard prerequisites.
First, a senior IBM i professional needs to be available to serve as a mentor.
Second, a modernized codebase. IBM i trainer Michele Lyons has been direct about this: if you want developers who know Java or Python to work on fixed-format RPG III, the code has to be readable to them before training can work.
Third, typically 12-24 months of runway before a trainee can work independently on production systems.
That said, the IBM i community is actively building the training infrastructure that individual organizations cannot build on their own.
In the UK, i-UG’s i-ignite program — run in partnership with universities including Wolverhampton, Leeds Beckett, Bedford, and Hertfordshire — delivers a structured course that takes students with no IBM i experience to working proficiency on live Power servers. At the i-UG iPower Conference in Milton Keynes in June 2026, the program announced its 100th student placement at a UK company.
In the US, COMMON — the IBM i user group at common.org — runs a free “New to i” learning series at learn.common.org covering IBM i fundamentals for developers entering the platform for the first time, presented by IBM engineers and IBM i practitioners.
Neither program replaces the internal mentorship and runway that hire-and-train requires, but both meaningfully reduce the cold-start problem for organizations willing to hire and develop new entrants.
IBM Bob also directly addresses the second hire-and-train prerequisite — the modernized, readable codebase. For organizations pairing hire-and-train with IBM Bob, the tool auto-generates documentation and explains legacy programs before a new developer touches production code, which removes one of the most consistent failure points in the model.
There is also a career argument worth making to prospective hires that is rarely made explicitly.
The same demographic shift that makes IBM i talent hard to find makes it an unusually good time to enter the field. The senior layer is exiting faster than it is being replaced, which means developers who invest in genuine IBM i depth today are likely to reach senior and lead roles on a timeline that simply does not exist in saturated mainstream technology stacks. The scarcity that creates the problem for employers creates the opportunity for people willing to step into it.
VIRTUTEM is navigating this same transition within our own practice. We are deliberately building the next generation of IBM i practitioners as the senior layer moves toward retirement, and using the same combination of structured mentorship, modern tooling, including IBM Bob, and community engagement through programs like i-ignite and COMMON that we recommend to our clients. It is not a challenge we observe from the outside. It is one we are managing from within.
An IT Director with a departing BPCS expert and a pending ERP upgrade on the calendar has none of these three in place.
What The Managed Services Model Looks Like
The people who interact with your IBM i system are interacting with your ERP — placing purchase orders, running MRP, processing shipments, and closing the books at month’s end.
That’s the layer that breaks when the people who built and configured it leave.
ERP Managed Services for IBM i covers that layer directly.
Not the server. Not the OS. The application your teams use every day — the Infor LX or BPCS configuration, the RPG and COBOL programs that run your business workflows, the customizations that encode twenty years of operational decisions, the job streams that process your production schedule overnight, and the EDI environment that connects your ERP to every trading partner you work with.
EDI knowledge is as vulnerable to retirement as ERP knowledge, and most generalist MSPs have no one who can resolve a trading partner mapping failure at 9 PM before a ship window.
A generalist managed services provider keeps the system running.
An ERP specialist keeps the business running on the system. The 20-year-old BPCS customization that controls how your warehouse allocates inventory doesn’t care whether the hardware is healthy. It needs someone who understands what it does, why it was built that way, and how to support it when something changes.
That is what VIRTUTEM provides. As an Infor Alliance Partner since 2016, and Infor’s only designated business partner for PRMS services in North America, VIRTUTEM brings over thirty years of application-layer depth to IBM i ERP environments.
When the people who built your Infor LX or BPCS environment retire, the configuration knowledge, customization history, workflow expertise, and EDI capability do not have to leave with them.
VIRTUTEM also deploys IBM Bob — IBM’s newly available AI development tool built specifically for IBM i — across its entire delivery team, which means onboarding into undocumented environments happens faster, and the documentation produced belongs to the client.
What that looks like in practice: In one active engagement, a global industrial manufacturer’s BPCS team was deliberately moved onto a concurrent SAP transformation. VIRTUTEM onboarded through structured shadowing over three months, reached independent ticket handling by month three, and became the primary support resource by month five — reducing an open backlog of 150+ tickets with an average age of over 80 days to approximately 30 tickets averaging under 30 days.
The engagement has been active for several years and continues today.
IBM i Remains a Strong Platform
The 2026 Fortra survey found that 95% of IBM i users report superior ROI compared to competing platforms, and 70% planned hardware or software upgrades in 2026.
IBM i 7.6 launched in April 2025. Power Systems investment is active. The platform itself remains actively supported and heavily used in manufacturing, distribution, and ERP environments.
The staffing model built around a large pool of experienced IBM i professionals who came up on the platform is aging out. And the successor model, whatever form it takes for a given organization, needs to be in place before the next retirement, not after it.
Start with VIRTUTEM’s Complimentary ERP Environment Assessment
VIRTUTEM has delivered ERP Managed Services for IBM i to manufacturing and distribution organizations across North America for over 30 years. As an Infor Alliance Partner and Infor’s only designated business partner for PRMS services in North America, VIRTUTEM’s ERP Architects bring application-layer depth — ERP configuration, RPG and COBOL code, EDI, and now IBM Bob — that generalist IBM i providers cannot match.
If you’re working through what that structure looks like for your environment — what stays internal, what the partner covers, how knowledge transfer works over time — schedule a free consultation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the IBM i RPG developer shortage going to get worse?
Yes, in the near term. Over 72% of IBM i developers are currently over 50, with 35% already 60 or older.
There is no large-scale training pipeline producing replacements. RPG is not attracting new learners at any scale that would change the market within the next decade. The same applies to COBOL on IBM i.
Organizations that have not already begun planning for succession are behind.
Should we use managed services or hire-and-train?
They are not mutually exclusive.
Managed services provide immediate continuity and cover the application layer while internal capability is rebuilt. Hire-and-train builds long-term internal depth but requires 12-24 months before a trainee works independently, with a senior mentor, and a readable codebase.
Most organizations benefit from running in parallel. Managed services also makes hire-and-train more viable. The pressure is off the existing team, and IBM Bob helps make the codebase readable before training begins.
Does the IBM i talent shortage affect COBOL shops as well as RPG shops?
Yes. COBOL remains actively used in IBM i environments running custom business applications, and the demographic profile of COBOL developers on IBM i mirrors that of RPG developers — experienced, senior, and approaching retirement with no comparable replacement cohort.
IBM Bob Premium Package for i supports both RPG and COBOL, which means the AI-assisted documentation and modernization capabilities apply to COBOL environments as well.
What is IBM Bob and how does it help with the IBM i talent shortage?
IBM Bob is IBM’s newly available AI development tool built specifically for IBM i.
Unlike generic AI tools, it natively understands RPG, CL, COBOL, and Db2 for i, and connects directly to your IBM i system. It helps new developers understand complex legacy programs in hours rather than weeks, auto-generates documentation from existing code, refactors old RPG to modern ILE RPG, and generates unit tests before changes are made.
The IBM Bob Premium Package for i is available from IBM’s marketplace and is used by VIRTUTEM’s entire delivery team as part of its managed services practice.
When is the right time to start planning for IBM i staffing succession?
Before the retirement, not after it.
Every option in this article — managed services, hire-and-train, IBM Bob — works better and costs less when an experienced internal resource is still available to participate in the transition. That person can validate documentation, explain undocumented logic, and transfer institutional knowledge in an orderly way.
Once they are gone, that window closes. If a departure is on the horizon in the next twelve to twenty-four months, planning should be underway now.