Step 09 of 10 Throughout the program, intensifying in the last 6-12 months· advanced
Step 9: Workforce Transition
Capture institutional knowledge before it retires; retrain transferable engineers; transition operations; lead the culture change. Failed modernizations often fail here.
Recommended prompts
Use one of these to do the work in your IDE
Open the template to read it in full. Click Copy prompt to grab it (with your stack values pre-filled where they apply) — then paste into Claude Code, Cursor, or wherever you build.
Recommended skills
Drop these into Claude Code for this phase
Skills auto-trigger on the right kind of request. Install once; they apply to every prompt that fits.
Recommended MCP configs
Wire these tools into Claude Code first
MCP servers give Claude Code direct access to external systems (Jira, browsers, databases). Configure once.
When you're done
Verify these in your own work before moving on
This is a checklist for you to mentally tick off in your repo and IDE — the site doesn't track it, you do.
- Knowledge capture from retiring engineers complete
- Retraining program for transferable engineers complete
- Operations team trained on the new stack
- HR plans for non-transferable roles documented and executed
- Culture transition managed (deployment cadence, observability practices)
Common pitfalls
What goes wrong at this step
- Treating the COBOL team as obstacles — they have decades of valuable knowledge. Bring them along
- No retraining budget — leaders assume engineers can pick up new skills off-hours; they often can't or won't
- Ignoring operations — mainframe ops and cloud ops are different jobs. Plan for it
- No leadership change — same leadership pattern that ran mainframe for 20 years won't optimize the cloud-native target