For the past nine years, if you asked an IT leader within an IBM i shop what kept them awake at night, the answer was almost universally the same: cybersecurity.
Despite having a reputation of being inherently secure, IBM i-based businesses have increasingly had to consider how to secure their enterprise data against a relentlessly evolving threat landscape.
That’s intensified over recent years with the advent of AI within the threat landscape.
But for the first time, cybersecurity isn’t the top concern…People are.
In the 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey, the IBM i skills gap officially overtook security as the number one concern for the first time.
69% of respondents cited finding qualified talent as their primary concern. Cybersecurity now sits at number two, with 64%.
Why the sudden shift in top concerns for the IBM i?
As Mike Davison from Fortra noted in a discussion with Proximity’s Sales Director, Andy Nicholson, in episode #33 of the IBM i Update about the results, the primary driver is simply that IBM i developers and specialists are retiring and no one is available to replace them.
When these experienced (dare we say, veteran) developers leave, they take the critical knowledge about the IBM i applications and systems with them.
For so many IBM i shops, the real value of those IBM i applications isn’t just the underlying code itself, but the deeply embedded business logic built into it over decades.
These business rules are often (quite often in our experience) undocumented.
When a key developer logs off for the last time, that knowledge goes with them, directly impacting the ability of the business to then support and change the business-critical systems your operations rely on.
Nobody is questioning the platform. Especially us, as we have one of the largest teams of IBM i developers and specialists in the UK (all employed directly by us and based in the UK).
IBM i applications still run countless finance, manufacturing, distribution, logistics and retail operations across the globe.
For those in the IBM i community, the concern is who will keep those applications running.
What is causing the IBM i “Brain Drain”
Why has the skills gap reached a point now where it has been identified as the number one concern amongst IBM i leaders?
The answer lies in demographics and the application knowledge that sits within your business.
On one hand, a generation of IBM i developers, system administrators, and architects who built and maintained these mission-critical systems are reaching retirement age.
Meanwhile, higher education institutions rarely teach IBM i development skills (apart from one or two notable exceptions).
When combined together, those factors are leaving a shrinking talent pool to support, maintain and develop a platform that underpins the operations of thousands of global enterprises.
What is the cost of the IBM i Skills Gap and what risks does it expose?
Addressing this gap isn’t just about speaking to a specialist recruiter, or posting a job description on Indeed or LinkedIn and waiting for a qualified applicant to apply.
In the current market, trying to hire an experienced IBM i developer or specialist means navigating high and hefty recruiter fees (if that’s the route you take).
Once the chosen candidate joins your organisation, you’ve got months of onboarding to go through until they’re fully up to speed on the applications they’ll be supporting and maintaining.
If you do have to compete for a dwindling pool of experienced IBM i developers, your operational expenditure could increase significantly.
On the other hand, choosing to do nothing and hoping your current IT team can pick up the slack left by a developer retiring or changing roles can risk burnout amongst your team and potentially expose your applications to costly downtime.
The impact on those enterprises is immediate and potentially severe:
- Delayed development projects and missed SLAs: routine system and application updates aren’t completed leaving the operating system out-of-date. Development projects and application modernisation stall because there simply isn’t enough internal resource to write or review code.
- Operational vulnerability: overworked and under resourced internal teams face burnout, increasing the likelihood of human error during critical system maintenance.
- Innovation treads water: instead of taking advantage of modern programming languages, integrations, new mobile and web interfaces, AI and cloud hosting, IT teams are stuck simply “treading water”.
Quantifying the risks of the IBM i Skills Gap
IT leaders need a way to look past gut feel and evaluate their actual risk exposure.
That’s why we developed the IBM i Risk Calculator.
With clearer visibility and understanding of your organisation’s risk profile, you can decide whether retraining existing staff, using an application managed service or hiring new developers is the right path forward.
It might even help you decide if a move to a cloud hosting solution (or even a complete migration from IBM i) would minimise risk exposure.
It only takes a couple of minutes to complete, but it will provide you with some numbers that you can take to your CFO or board regarding the financial and operational risk of replacing your IBM i developers and hiring, retaining or outsourcing IBM i developers.
Don’t wait for a retirement notice or resignation to force your hand. Base your IBM i application resourcing decisions on evidence rather than instinct.