{"id":6451,"date":"2026-03-24T12:59:54","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T16:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.softwareag.com\/?p=6451"},"modified":"2026-05-07T17:50:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T21:50:25","slug":"building-the-next-generation-of-adabas-natural-experts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.softwareag.com\/en\/blog\/skills\/building-the-next-generation-of-adabas-natural-experts\/","title":{"rendered":"Building the next generation of Adabas & Natural experts\u00a0\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge of generational change <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Most organizations discover a familiar pattern. Deep expertise has concentrated in a few individuals who understand how systems actually behave under real-world conditions\u2014knowledge that rarely makes it into documentation because it lives in experience, not manuals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do organizations respond?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proven strategies for managing generational change <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

From our experience helping customers navigate generational change, these strategies consistently deliver results: <\/p>\n\n\n\n