Walk into almost any midmarket shop still running IBM i, and you’ll hear the same line: “Our system just runs. It never breaks.” As a CIO, I used to take comfort in that. It felt like proof that we were making the right bets.

Over time, I learned the hard lesson that reliability creates its own operational risk. I call it the IBM i reliability paradox. It shows up slowly, then all at once, and it’s now the most common gap I see when we audit environments.

In this post, we will explain why IBM i skills are vanishing and how that decay amplifies downtime. We’ll also cover what leaders can do before retiring talent or unplanned outages force modernization decisions on the hardest timeline possible.

Reliability Can Hide Risk

IBM i behaves like a self-healing appliance. It optimizes, recovers, and quietly corrects issues on its own. The more consistently it does that, the easier it becomes for teams to stop looking.

Over time, basic operational rigor slowly evaporates. Operators stop checking QSYSOPR. Admins stop tracking storage trends. Nobody verifies replication. PTF strategy becomes tribal knowledge or disappears entirely.

The Process of Skills Decay

In the 80s and 90s, IBM i admins were specialists with deep knowledge of LIC, PTF structures, journaling mechanics, and RPG workflows. Today, most midmarket organizations face a different reality.

The last veteran is within a year of retirement. Their replacement is usually a generalist who knows enough to keep the lights on but not enough to interpret early-warning signals.

The platform becomes a black box. Leadership assumes it’s healthy as long as it boots. Vendors focus on hardware, not OS-level expertise. Meanwhile, modern workloads introduce complexity that the legacy documentation never covered.

Without deliberate investment in knowledge, the platform’s reliability becomes a false indicator of readiness.

How Skills Gaps Show Up In Production

When skills disappear, risk doesn’t spike immediately. It accumulates quietly. In our audits, we routinely find predictive failure messages ignored for months, PTFs years out of date, and backups that can’t be restored. These aren’t acts of negligence. They’re symptoms of ownership disappearing.

Outages Take Longer Without Expertise

Once the last knowledgeable person is unavailable, the nature of downtime changes. RCA stretches from minutes to hours because nobody recognizes historical warning patterns. DR tests fail because no one ever validated replication, and there’s no documentation for recovery steps. Vendors troubleshoot blindly because context is missing.

A thirty-minute incident becomes a multi-hour outage. Storage spikes become a performance collapse. A hardware alert becomes a full system stop.

What a Real Collapse Looks Like

A few years back, I sat with a CIO whose organization had gone eight years without a single IBM i outage. Their last specialist retired quietly. Documentation was minimal, but nobody felt urgency because the system “just worked.”

One Friday night, storage crept past 90 percent during a batch cycle. Journal receivers ballooned, replication lagged, and QSYSOPR filled with messages no one reviewed. By the time the on-call generalist logged in, the system was already in distress.

They called hardware support first, who pointed them to OS issues. The next call was to their application vendor, who told them to “check replication.” Nobody knew how, and hours passed.

By the time we took over, replication had stalled, and backups were incomplete. The team had spent 6 hours chasing symptoms rather than the root cause.

They didn’t lose data. But the CIO told me afterwards that the outage was the moment they realized the real risk wasn’t the platform. They assumed that their old reliability guaranteed future stability.

Missing Expertise Blocks Modernization

Lack of IBM i experience doesn’t just increase downtime. It stalls modernization. Leaders keep 20-year-old custom applications in place because only one programmer understands them. Evaluations get deferred because nobody knows where the real risks live. Projects stall because the team doesn’t know what can be safely retired or integrated.

How CIOs Solve the Skills Collapse

You don’t need a multi-year program. The answers are clear ownership and support.

Reassign ownership today. Define named owners for PTF cadence, storage monitoring, replication validation, and backup verification. If nobody owns it, nobody does it.

Bring in external expertise before you need it. Managed IBM i support and cloud hosting to fill critical gaps proactively. They prevent your team from having to diagnose unfamiliar problems under pressure.

Treat reliability as a warning sign, not comfort. Test, audit, and validate. If you haven’t run a DR test in a year, schedule one. If backups haven’t been verified, start there.

Resilience isn’t about hardware; it’s about preparation.

Uptime Now Depends on Expertise

The AS400 didn’t suddenly become risky. The skills that kept it healthy evaporated quietly while systems kept running. Leaders who invest in expertise get uptime, clarity, and modernization options. Leaders who rely on past reliability for comfort create fragile environments.

FAQs About Dealing With the AS400 Skills Collapse

Why is IBM i talent disappearing so quickly?

Retirements are accelerating, and the platform’s reliability reduces the incentive for organizations to train replacements. That creates a growing operational gap.

How do I know if my IBM i is healthy?

Health requires evidence: PTF currency, storage trend visibility, validated replication, and recoverable backups. If you can’t produce those quickly, you don’t have proof of health.

When should I bring in external IBM i expertise?

Bring help in when your last veteran is nearing retirement, your DR tests fail, or your team is mostly generalists. The most damaging outages happen when organizations wait until something breaks before calling for assistance.

What risks come from outdated PTFs?

Outdated PTFs accumulate security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and compatibility gaps with modern tools. Falling several years behind also increases the effort required to return to a supported baseline.

How do skills gaps impact modernization?

Without platform expertise, it’s difficult to assess dependencies, map workloads, or evaluate migration paths. Modernization stalls not because leadership lacks interest, but because there’s no internal guide to validate decisions.

Is IBM i still a viable core system?

Yes. IBM i remains one of the most resilient and efficient architectures. The problem isn’t the platform; it’s the lack of operational rigor. With the right ownership and support, it remains a high-value asset.

What should my first step be if I suspect a skills gap?

Start with an audit. Establish visibility into PTF status, storage, backups, and replication. Once the baselines are clear, assign ownership and systematically close the gaps.

Close Your Skills Gaps Before They Cause Outages

The skills collapse isn’t theoretical. It shows up in unreviewed messages, outdated PTF levels, fragile backups, and DR plans that fail when you need them most. The organizations that remain resilient focus on ownership, documentation, and support.

If you’re ready to rebuild operational confidence around your IBM i environment, start with clarity. Contact our team to learn more.