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> Assuming I wanted to pick up COBOL and land a contract gig, what else do I need to know?

In a saner world, nothing. Someone hiring for COBOL would see a candidate who knows a handful of other programming languages, some database theory, and a little bit of other experience and hire and actually train them.

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Databases often don't enter into it. A lot of mainframe COBOL work is batch-oriented. It basically just streams through a series of flat files.

Source: I worked for a bank in my youth, which involved writing COBOL.

I had a class called "Introduction to file processing" that was basically "here's how you manage your data files," and taought us about the evolution from sequential access, to ISAM, to VSAM. Ended up working in RDMBS/SQL but it was a fascinating class - despite the assignments being in FORTRAN.

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