Best currently avaliable classes/education for getting a new RPG developer

I'm curious to get some thoughts on this...

We were lucky enough here at our company to have a long standing and very
experienced set of RPG and IBM i oriented developers in our small IT
department that maintained a number of homegrown applications supporting
most aspects of our manufacturing oriented business.


As part of a 6-7 person department, we traditionally have had:

An IT director who functioned as a development manager/architect who had
designed and spec'd the overall nature of the homegrown applications for
30+ years (including the corrresponding skill/experience to
code/troubleshoot/support)
3 or 4  RPG oriented developers with 20+ years of
coding/troubleshooting/supporting the homegrown applications here (with
assorted sets of other coding skills involving Java/web/EDI/etc.).
Over the years, all of these said staffers gained a great deal of
understanding of the business needs and interconnections of such needs
reflected in the set of code

In recent years, the coding oriented needs often dwindled enought that 3
developers had been sufficient to keep things going well.


Due to several retirements, an untimely death, and one young developer
jumping ship, we now are left with ONE very experienced RPG oriented
developer that is doing a great job of learning the business and apps (he
has been here a year).  That's it for our development staff...

We made a serious attempt at getting the knowledge transferred before the
retirements, but our young guy who got three years of education from the
outgoing staff took off for other pastures, and one of our original guys
planning to work another 4 years just didn't make it through a serious
health battle - so the situation has changed quickly!


We have a few good prospects in the works for new hire developers, but the
RPG oriented skill set is just not there in the prospects we are finding...
a few of these are 'right' mix of personality and experience, but they will
be learning on the RPG and IBM i side of things...



With all that long winded background, i'm looking for suggestions on the
best resources you all might know of for training/education on RPG oriented
development (RPG IV and ILE to the best of my understanding... i'm more of
an IBM i admin).  The IBM i education world has changed a ton post Covid,
and the previous modality of instructor led classroom training seems to
have mostly disappeared.

A preference would still be for instructor led virtual/remote training as
opposed to self paced (whether it be as part of a multiperson class
including other organizations or potentially with a one on one
instructor)... with the goal being to get them up to speed as quickly as
possible on RPG and IBM i skills (knowing how tall of an order that is).

The new hire developers (experienced in other languages and development)
will fortunately have some access to several or our recently retired
developers in the short term (who are willing to help train on specifics of
the apps and business needs behind them). So, if we can find a few good
classes to help them get learn the overall background structure/mechanics
of the language/environment, that will be a huge help (and let our subject
matter expert retirees focus on the specifics of what we do here as a
company).


Any advice or training resource recommendations will be much appreciated!


Chad Burrall
[email protected]
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