IBM to hire 25,000 in US, invest $1 bn over next four years
14 Dec 2016
IBM chief executive officer Ginni Rometty said she planned to hire about 25,000 people in the US and invest $1 billion over the next four years. The announcement comes on the eve of a meeting of industry leaders with President-elect Donald Trump.
Rometty, who is on Trump's advisory panel of business leaders, will join Facebook Inc's Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon.com Inc's Jeff Bezos and Alphabet Inc's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt at a summit with Trump today in New York that would focus on jobs.
Trump had made employment a key issue in his campaign. He had also vowed to scrap trade deals he viewed as sucking jobs from the economy and promised to impose tariffs on imports if necessary. Recently he had claimed credit for preventing thousands of manufacturing jobs from going overseas and used state incentives to strike a deal with Carrier, a unit of United, to pull back its plan to shift some operations to Mexico.
Rometty said yesterday in a piece for USA Today , "Today, leaders in business, government and across civil society in the U.S. and around the world are grappling with disruptive changes in technology, markets and society, changes that are having a major impact on economies and employment.
"But even as many seek to revitalize traditional industries, lasting job creation will require an understanding of important new dynamics in the global labor market. This is not about white collar vs. blue collar jobs, but about the ''new collar'' jobs that employers in many industries demand, but which remain largely unfilled.
"Consider just one industry in one country. According to the US Department of Labor, there are more than half a million open jobs in technology-related sectors in the United States. At IBM alone, we have thousands of open positions at any given moment, and we intend to hire about 25,000 professionals in the next four years in the United States, 6,000 of those in 2017. IBM will also invest $1 billion in training and development of our US employees in the next four years.
