MVS, Cobol and Cics are valuable skills on your CV if you want work in Windows NT environments.

That's the claim of a white paper from services company ICL. Scaling Windows NT for the enterprise argues that the biggest barrier to Windows NT's acceptance in the data centre over the next few years will be a lack of staff with an understanding of mission-critical and company-wide applications.

'Windows NT has generally been used in small environments, file and print server, that sort of thing,' said Peter Slavid, business strategy manager for ICL.

'As a result, the people who come from those environments don't have the right mindset for the enterprise.'

In contrast, older staff with training in mainframe-type environments are familiar with enterprise issues such as availability, diagnostics, response times, documentation, and resilience, he says.

IT consultancy GartnerGroup said that a shortage of this combination of skills will be the biggest issue facing organisations who want to deploy NT in the data centre.

ICL argues that it may be better for employers to train older, more experienced staff who have longer service records and have invested more time in their company, than to take on younger staff who will be more likely to leave.

The company is following its own advice: it is retraining up to 4,000 staff as Microsoft certified engineers.

Ian Bramley, chairman of the Butler Group's NT Forum, agrees on the importance of legacy skills in NT environments.

'These old disciplines will come back into play as NT moves into the enterprise,' he said.

However, Bramley warns against an over-reliance on older mainframe-trained staff. 'I don't think you would want to turn swords into ploughshares,' he said.

Organisations should instead use a combination of NT and mainframe-trained staff to work in mixed environments, Bramley says.