That’s the premise behind the Mainframe Talent Succession Playbook, a research-backed guide we at Broadcom commissioned from CCS Insight. Based on direct interviews with Broadcom customers and leading education partners, the report explores the state of talent readiness across mainframe roles within today’s hybrid IT environments.
The findings were eye-opening and highly actionable.
From addressing succession gaps to skilling strategy, the report uncovered five powerful truths that are reshaping how leading enterprises are building resilience into their talent pipeline.
Here are 5 takeaways every mainframe leader should know:
The most successful organizations treat their mainframe environments as integrated platforms- springboards for innovation that work in tandem with cloud-native and distributed systems. In the playbook, we saw firms attract top talent and executive backing by showcasing the platform’s role in AI acceleration, quantum-safe encryption, and hybrid cloud integration. These aren’t future ambitions—they’re happening now.
By positioning the mainframe as one of the key places where innovation happens, they transformed both perception and performance.
What to do: Show your teams how their work on Z contributes to enterprise-wide innovation. Highlight breakthrough projects, showcase measurable impact, and invite your engineers to build what’s next.
Think training is a soft perk? Think again.
Top-performing organizations treat upskilling time the way they treat system uptime—tracked, protected, and required. 80+ hours per year, structured boot camps, and rotations across cloud and mainframe roles are standard practice. Why? When learning is built into the rhythm of delivery, retention and resiliency follow.
What to do: Tie training budgets to platform health KPIs. If you wouldn’t run code without regression tests, don’t run teams without learning paths.
Relying on a single SME for core infrastructure? That’s a fragility issue, not just a staffing one.
The smartest firms implemented “two-in-the-box” structures: pairing senior and junior engineers to ensure mutual coverage, continuity, and mentoring. This isn’t just insurance against retirement, but rather an engine for upskilling, onboarding, and burnout prevention.
What to do: Conduct a heatmap of single points of failure across your people. Where there’s only one name listed, you have a resilience gap.
Most succession efforts stall because no one owns them.
The Playbook recommends clear governance: a named talent optimization lead, accountability at the CIO level, and KPIs such as apprentice conversion, documentation completeness, and coverage ratios. These aren’t “nice to have”. They’re structural necessities.
What to do: Add workforce resilience to your next board-level risk review. If you’re tracking CPU load, you can track succession health.
The best organizations don’t see succession as risk mitigation. They see it as future enablement. From on-chip AI inference in z17, to advancements across cloud and quantum-ready encryption—there’s a lot on the horizon. You need a workforce that’s not only ready to support that innovation but also drive it.
What to do: Tie succession planning directly to your modernization roadmap. Who’s ready to own your future initiatives on Z? Build that bridge now.
The Bottom Line
Workforce resiliency is no longer a back-office HR initiative, but a front-line imperative across every platform and team in your IT stack. At Broadcom, we’re embedding these principles into everything we do, from our Vitality Program and Expert Program- to our full Beyond Code program with offerings designed to solve our customers’ most pressing business challenges that sit beyond traditional coded software.
If you're ready to move from talent fragility to engineered continuity, the Mainframe Talent Succession Playbook is your blueprint.