Imagine your most experienced IBM i developer walks into your office and hands you a resignation letter, effective in 60 days. For a moment, it doesn’t fully land. Then it does.

For over two decades, this one person has kept your entire environment running without missing a beat. They not only built a significant part of it, but also understand the undocumented business logic, exceptions, and workarounds that exist nowhere else. And in two months, all of that walks out the door with them.

This is not a hypothetical situation. Organizations across industries worldwide that rely on IBM i are beginning to face exactly this moment.

While the platform itself continues to deliver unmatched reliability and stability, the human expertise behind it is becoming increasingly scarce. And the hard truth is—this is just the beginning.

The RPG Talent Gap Is Expanding

The IBM i ecosystem is facing a broader, industry-wide shift that is already underway. The industry indicators tell a sobering story, and they are hard to ignore:

• The Looming Retirement Wave: According to ASNA, a major section of the RPG talent pool will be retiring by 2030. Aside from exiting the workforce, they will take away their decades of institutional knowledge, hands-on experience, and deep familiarity with business-critical systems.
• Shrinking Talent Pipelines: RPG is not taught widely across universities, educational institutes, or coding bootcamps. Therefore, only a handful of new talent is entering the ecosystem, increasing the demand for hiring and retaining skilled professionals while the supply is diminishing.
• Rising Skill Shortage Concern: The 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey found that 69% of IBM i users now rank IBM i skills as their top concern, a figure that has steadily risen over the past few years.

Almost 73% of users run homegrown applications on their IBM i, says the Marketplace Survey Report 2026. Developed and evolved over the years by the very professionals now approaching retirement, these custom-built systems would become a liability for organizations without the talent to maintain them.

The risk is not theoretical. This fast-paced, structural talent gap is arriving faster than most organizations are prepared for. Moreover, it cannot be addressed through traditional hiring alone, but requires a more strategic, long-term response from business and technology leaders alike.

Why RPG Talent Gaps Pose a Unique Business Risk

At first glance, the departure of an RPG developer may seem like the loss of any other IT professional, an unfortunate but manageable staffing challenge. In reality, it is a fundamentally different, expensive, and complex endeavor.

1. The Tribal Knowledge Problem

Unlike modern development environments, many IBM i environments have evolved organically over decades. RPG developers who built and maintained these systems become their living documentation. They accumulate an intricate understanding of the vital components and changes made over the years. Oftentimes, there is no wiki, manual, or backup to fall back upon. When they leave, that knowledge leaves with them permanently.

2. Tightly Coupled, Complex Codebases

Many RPG III and early RPG IV applications were created for functionality and performance, rather than readability or long-term maintainability. Over time, these systems have been continuously modified to meet changing business needs, resulting in tightly coupled, sparsely commented, and deeply intertwined components. Even an experienced developer picking it up fresh would need months to understand and get accustomed to its intricacies.

3. No Quick Replacement

RPG is a niche skill set that is becoming increasingly rare. Unlike more common programming languages, you cannot simply post a job opening and expect a qualified RPG developer to walk in next week. Even after finding the right talent, familiarizing them with decades-old systems will require time and guidance.

4. Strained Teams

Only 15% and 4% of organizations have over 20 IBM i developers and 10 administrators on their team respectively. As experienced professionals exit, the burden on remaining teams increases. Smaller teams are often forced to prioritize day-to-day maintenance and firefighting, leaving little room for strategic IT initiatives such as compliance, innovation, or planned modernization. This imbalance quietly increases the risk of downtime, potential regulatory exposure, and slow progress.

5. Business Continuity Impact

Experienced professionals manage environments that powered several critical operations. When the knowledge behind these systems disappears, businesses not only slow down, but also face the risk of coming to a halt.

Taken together, these factors make the retirement of an RPG professional a greater concern for businesses rather than a mere HR challenge. And the window to act before it becomes a crisis is narrowing.

What Not to Do When Bridging the Talent Gap

When faced with the impending retirement of RPG professionals, many C-suite executives and IT leaders fall into reactive decision-making. While these urgent responses may seem understandable in the short-term, they can lead to hard-to-reverse consequences, greater expenses, and long-term inefficiencies.

Before exploring what works, it is worth addressing what does not.

• Delaying Decisions: Waiting until a resignation is imminent or already in motion narrows your options and time available for knowledge transfer, strategic evaluation, and transition planning.
• Relying on Retired Contractors: Bringing back retired professionals or hiring contractors for temporary support can bridge an immediate gap. However, it does not address the underlying knowledge transfer problem or build long-term capability.
• Swapping RPG Talent with Generic Developers: Onboarding developers who are unfamiliar with IBM i may seem like a viable workaround. However, expecting them to maintain decades-old RPG codebases without context, mentorship, or transition support can inadvertently lead to errors, delays, and costly risk in mission-critical systems.
• Supplanting Systems: The retirement of key RPG programmers is not a signal to replace everything. Large-scale system transformations without a clear roadmap, realistic timelines, and a thorough understanding of the environment are expensive and disruptive decisions that may deliver unexpected outcomes and impact ongoing operations. And many organizations have learned that lesson the hard way.

Rather than hasty decisions, the moment calls for a deliberate, structured response built around your organization’s specific environment, risk profile, and long-term goals.

Six Strategic Ways to Address the IBM i RPG Developer Shortage 2026

Addressing the IBM i RPG developer shortage 2026 is not about choosing a single solution. Rather, it’s about aligning the right combination of strategies with your organization’s timelines, team size, risk profile, platform complexity, and long-term goals. The following approaches offer a practical starting point for actively building a resilient, long-term response to manage this transition.

1. Prioritize Knowledge Transfer and Documentation

The most immediate risk is not losing a developer — it is losing what they know. Organizations should start creating structured programs to capture this knowledge 12 to 24 months before a planned retirement, not after the resignation letter arrives.

• Establish a formal knowledge transfer program with dedicated time and accountability
• Have retiring RPG programmers document critical workflows, programs, exceptions, dependencies, and business rules
• Record walkthroughs and build runbooks for key processes
• Organize mentorship sessions between senior and junior team members

This initiative moves institutional knowledge out of one person’s head and into a format that the broader team can access, reference, and build upon even after individuals transition out of the organization.

2. Upskill and Reskill Internal Talent

Who knows, the next best RPG developer may already be on your payroll.

Many organizations already have capable developers who can be trained to work within IBM i environments. Investing in the development of team members is one of the most cost-effective and culturally sustainable ways to address the RPG talent gap.

• Introduce IBM i fundamentals and RPG concepts to developers already familiar with adjacent technologies
• Incorporate APIs, SQL, and open-source tools available on IBM i to bridge legacy and modern skill sets
• Invite internal candidates for cross-functional learning sessions on multigenerational and modern systems

This approach not only reduces dependency on external hiring but also builds a resilient internal capability for the long term.

3. Hire Freshers or Career Changers

Given the limited availability of experienced RPG professionals, you must rethink traditional hiring strategies and look beyond conventional talent pools.

Recent IT graduates and professionals transitioning from other fields represent an often-overlooked alternative for IBM i organizations. While they might not have the required RPG experience, they bring enthusiasm, fresh perspectives, and modern programming foundations that can complement your existing team.

• Choose recent graduates with strong programming fundamentals and train them on IBM i
• Consider professionals transitioning from other IT disciplines who can bring diverse perspectives for faster adaptability and innovation
• Collaborate with senior IBM i staff to create structured onboarding and training pathways to compress the learning curve

With the right guidance, new entrants can become proficient IBM i developers faster than you can expect.

4. Adopt AI-Enabled and Automation Tools

Emerging tools are changing the way organizations understand, document, and manage RPG codebases. While not a replacement for human expertise, they help new and general developers comprehend and control undocumented systems faster.

• Introduce code analysis and documentation tools like Impact Analysis to assess existing RPG environment and capture dependencies
• Implement DevOps, deployment, and testing automation solutions to streamline day-to-day development and deployment operations

These tools act as force multipliers, enabling smaller teams to manage complex environments more efficiently and effectively.

5. Augment Teams with External IBM i Expertise

For organizations that need experienced RPG talent without the delays of a full hiring cycle, partnering with an IBM i modernization services company with a ready bench of experienced IBM i professionals is a proven and practical option.

This approach reduces burden from teams while long-term initiatives such as system transformation, transition, and upskilling are underway — without halting routine operations or locking your organization into a permanent headcount commitment.

6. Modernize Aging Applications

Rather than replacing systems outright, modernizing incrementally allows you to extend the life and value of your existing IBM i investment while making it more accessible to a broader, modern talent pool.

• Automate repetitive processes to reduce manual dependency
• Convert fixed-format RPG to free-format RPG to improve readability
• Introduce APIs, connectors, and middleware solutions to integrate IBM i systems with modern platforms
• Modularize monolithic programs to simplify management and maintenance
• Transform traditional green screens into modern user interfaces with tools like Green2Glass for easy usage and better experience

Modernization does not mean starting over. It means making what you have work better — for your business, your team, and the next generation of developers who will maintain it.

How Organizations are Tackling the RPG Talent Crisis

While the challenge of retiring RPG professionals is real, organizations are not standing still. Many are already navigating it, and some are doing so successfully.

Here are two real-world examples of what a strategic response can look like in practice.

Modernization as a Path Forward

In one instance, a consulting firm modernized its IBM i green-screen application before the professionals behind them retired. By redefining the user interface and restructuring parts of the application, the enterprise was able to enable new employees to easily access, learn, and use the application faster, while simultaneously opening doors to a broader talent pool.

Read the full story here

Staff Augmentation as a Continuity Bridge

In another case, a global manufacturing company was facing a surge of unresolved incidents and service requests. By bringing in experienced RPG professionals, they resolved over 1,000 requests, significantly reducing the internal IT team’s workload and operational costs. More importantly, this approach ensured business continuity by improving the stability and uptime of critical business systems — without the delays and risks associated with long hiring cycles.

Read the full story here

These examples underscore a broader truth: there is no single right answer to the RPG talent challenge. The right response depends on your environment, your timeline, and your business priorities. However, organizations that chose to act strategically rather than reactively have positioned their business and IT environments for long-term resilience.

Parting Thoughts

The retirement of RPG professionals is not a distant threat on the horizon. It is already reshaping IBM i environments across industries, and the organizations that will weather it best are those that choose to get ahead of it today.

As IBM i continues to evolve, businesses that have built on this platform have a significant, proven asset worth protecting. What requires attention is not the technology — it is the human expertise behind it. Here are three immediate steps you can take this week:

• Know Your Exposure: Identify which RPG developers are within five years of retirement and map the critical applications, programs, and systems they support.
• Start the Conversation: Engage your senior IBM i staff while there is still time to plan a structured knowledge transfer and transition rather than a forced one.
• Understand Your Codebase: Conduct an assessment of your existing IBM i environment to gain visibility and confidently decide on the next plan of action.

If you are not sure where to begin, a 30-minute free consultation with IBM i experts can help you act now rather than react later. This will not only protect your existing investments but also position your business for a more stable and sustainable future.

The retirement wave is inevitable. Your preparedness does not have to be.