In demand skills as on date

[theroyale]

Mainframe folks: I was looking for mainframe work in 2009-10 and to be honest the mainframe Market in the UK is bad. (a friend is looking now in 2011). I looked for 8 months, had one interview call for which there were dozens of applicants...

My advice would be for you to expand your skillet *now* ie train up in java/SQL/.net then go out there and get that first possibly low-paid contract in your new area.

Sounds bad I know but it isn't once you've switched. You can get back up to good pay rates pretty quickly in the contracting world...

[DodgyAgent]

COBOL doesn't seem to pay too well. Or DB2. Surprising.

Particularly if you do not have CICS. Citibank in the UK and Wipro in Poland hire these people as do RBS and Barclays

[darmstadt]

I have no problems getting mainframe contracts but I don't go for developer ones as I'm not a developer but there are plenty of them out there although most COBOL stuff is offshored. I also don't go for mainframe stuff in the UK because the rates are absolutely crap, the agents I've talked to don't have any idea what they're on about and tend to be real ******* arrogant idiots.

As someone else said, branch out into other areas as well. I have and as mainframes and distributed systems not integrate fully this gets me a lot of other work as well.

[theroyale]

Particularly if you do not have CICS. Citibank in the UK and Wipro in Poland hire these people as do RBS and Barclays

And if it helps this company called Allstate in Belfast were hiring MF devs by the dozen - check their website maybe they still are.