COBOL programmer required during covid 19

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has asked for volunteers who know COBOL progamming language.

“On our list of volunteers, not only do we need healthcare workers, we need engineers with COBOL skills,” Gov. Phil Murphy said in a statement.

COBOL language skills are needed during these times to update various governmental records, including post-mortem data of the deceased, in the US.

The State is using 40-plus year-old legacy systems that need programmers adept in using a decades-old computer language, created in 1959.

In the last two weeks, unemployment claims filed in the US jumped to over 362,000, according to the Department of Labor.

And these filings go into the legacy systems run on COBOL.

The aging Common Business Oriented Language underpins much of the U.S. financial industry, according to a Reuters report.

Roughly, 43% of banking systems are built on COBOL, and about 95% of ATM swipes rely on the 60-year-old language’s codes.

The average age of a COBOL programmer in 50, and less than 15% COBOL programmers are under 35.