Across industries, organizations are confronting a quiet but consequential shift: the people who built and maintained their core business systems are approaching retirement. Decades of institutional knowledge live in the heads of just a handful of practitioners who’ve spent careers nurturing these systems.
Yet the systems themselves aren’t going anywhere. Transaction volumes climb relentlessly, business processes evolve to meet market demands, and regulatory requirements multiply. Adabas & Natural applications still power critical workloads, processing millions of transactions daily.
For organizations to succeed into the future, it is crucial that they ensure the business logic embedded in their systems gets understood, supported, and extended by the next generation while reducing transition risk without overwhelming already-stretched teams.
The challenge of generational change
Most organizations discover a familiar pattern. Deep expertise has concentrated in a few individuals who understand how systems actually behave under real-world conditions—knowledge that rarely makes it into documentation because it lives in experience, not manuals.
While seasoned experts prepare for retirement, workloads keep rising and internal resources shrink. Day-to-day operations consume every available hour, leaving little time for mentoring, documentation, and training. Organizations find themselves caught between attracting new talent and maintaining the reliability their operations depend on.
Left unaddressed, this creates cascading risk. Projects slow as fewer people understand system connections. Changes become difficult to implement safely. Teams grow overly cautious because confidence evaporates when only one or two people truly understand critical applications.
How do organizations respond?
To address this issue, companies often launch ambitious programs to hire developers before the departure of key senior personnel and pair these junior staff with experienced veterans to get them onboarded quickly. In addition to outside hiring, companies facing generational change will often increase contractor reliance, and invest in mainframe training for existing staff.
These efforts help, but scaling proves difficult. Internal teams lack bandwidth to mentor while keeping systems running. The competitive market for mainframe specialists makes recruiting expensive and often fruitless. Relying on individual experts creates dangerous single points of failure.
Organizations that succeed treat generational change as a capability challenge, not just a staffing issue. They combine people, processes, and technology to distribute knowledge broadly and build team confidence systematically.
Proven strategies for managing generational change
From our experience helping customers navigate generational change, these strategies consistently deliver results:
- Combine internal and external expertise: Augment your team with specialized skills while building in-house knowledge. For example, a Nordic financial services customer paired junior developers with retired experts as mentors, using Software AG’s structured training to ensure a smooth knowledge transfer.
- Replace ad-hoc handoffs with structured programs: Formal mentorship and try-and-hire initiatives embed new talent in your environment, allowing you to evaluate fit before permanent hiring. A Swiss manufacturer used this approach to attract IT talent to a remote location, transitioning several consultants into full-time roles after proving their value.
- Modernize tooling: Use environments like the NaturalONE IDE and Natural for Visual Studio Code (coming soon) to bridge the gap between legacy systems and modern development practices. A U.S. manufacturer stabilized operations by adopting these tools, enabling seamless collaboration between experienced and new developers.
- Invest in training and upskilling: Virtual courses, hands-on mentoring, and AI-assisted tools (like the upcoming Natural AI Code Assist) help teams adapt quickly. A European insurance company maintained productivity during platform rehosting by leveraging Software AG’s 18-month technical support and training program.
- Standardize and document: Reduce reliance on undocumented tribal knowledge by capturing critical processes in accessible formats.
Software AG’s hybrid approach, which combines consulting, training, and modern tool, turns generational change into an opportunity for innovation. Explore our solutions.
How Software AG helps you navigate generational change
Software AG provides end-to-end support for generational change, including:
Professional Services:
Staff augmentation, try-and-hire programs, and proactive management of Adabas and Natural system operations. Our consultants integrate with your teams to handle development, database administration, and routine tasks—freeing your staff to focus on strategic priorities.
Modern development tools:
NaturalONE, an Eclipse-based IDE, is already available to streamline Natural development. Natural for Visual Studio Code, which extends familiarity and accessibility for new developers, is coming in 2026. Additionally, Natural AI Code Assist, an AI-powered assistant to accelerate learning and reduce onboarding time, will also be released later this year.
Training and learning paths:
From virtual instructor-led courses to self-paced modules, our programs build confidence and competence at every level. In addition to our standard training offerings, we also offer customized training and mentoring plans designed to support your unique learning needs.
Watch our webinar to see how Boston University addressed generational change with Software AG’s support.
Turning generational change into opportunity
Generational change doesn’t have to threaten stability. With the right expertise, tooling, and training, transition periods become opportunities to spread knowledge broadly, improve resilience, and make applications approachable for developers who represent your future.
Organizations seeing experts approach retirement need to act before knowledge walks out the door. Those struggling to onboard talent who view mainframes as mysterious relics must bridge old and new. Companies feeling the strain of growing workloads with shrinking resources require sustainable solutions.
The time to plan is now.
Software AG offers a free workshop with our Professional Services team to assess your generational change challenges and tailor a solution for your environment. From staff augmentation and mentorship programs to modern tooling, we provide the expertise, training, and support you need to navigate this transition smoothly.