If you think there is no future there in terms of not getting actual coding work (of which only you can be the best judge) then try to prepare for the interviews and you could *say* you did coding there and use your knowledge you gained (or will gain hereafter while preparing for interviews) and try to map it with your job (some of them could be not entirely true) but you should be able to defend in the interview if you choose to say you did a bunch of things in your current job (by which I mean coding work).
Translated, I read that as 'lie in your interview that you were coding when you really were not'. Not very good advice. Good interviewers can sniff this out. The OPs chances of securing another job may well be reduced if he decides to do this.
My work is just create an applet for a mainframe screen.
Why not do some R&D around that ? What are applets ? How are applets secured ? How do you sign an applet ? Why does the
java security model disallow applets to acquire certain types of resources ? How does it achieve this ?
I can think of more questions. If you choose to educate yourself and involve yourself in coding, it will do you a lot of good. Why wait for someone to 'assign' you a job when you can do it on your own ?