TL;DR; find a way to work in a mainframe environment. I think this is true of a lot of things, but starting in 2022, it's definitely true for learning cobol. Th

TL;DR; find a way to work in a mainframe environment. I think this is true of a lot of things, but starting in 2022, it's definitely true for learning cobol. The thing is, cobol is not just a programming language. Living and working in a mainframe environment is it's own whole thing. There is so much you'll have to learn. It's like the difference between linux and windows, but I'd argue is easily x2 to x5 as jarring. Just learning ebcdic instead of ascii is a thing. And navigating a green screen is as foreign to a modern pc user as, say, going from being a programmer in a high level language (like say java or c#) to using assembly language. It's not that you can't learn it, but it's that your whole brain has to be tilted to the side just to understand what's going on. A mainframe is a completely different world from modern pcs. The cobol programming language is 1/10th of it.