International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE IBM), long criticized for sending jobs overseas, will add 25,000 to its U.S. workforce, according to a piece in USAToday penned by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. She has emerged as a chief executive who has been aggressive in trying to ally herself with Donald Trump. One of Trump’s signature issues is to keep U.S. companies from exporting jobs.
Romety wrote about the new jobs:
Consider just one industry in one country. According to the U.S. 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 U.S. employees in the next four years.
And she said that many of these will not need high-tech educations:
But in many other cases, new collar jobs may not require a traditional college degree. In fact, at a number of IBM’s locations spread across the United States, as many as one-third of employees don’t have a four-year degree. What matters most is that these employees – with jobs such as cloud computing technicians and services delivery specialists – have relevant skills, often obtained through vocational training.
The general perception is that leading high-tech companies target engineers from America’s top universities.
IBM adds itself to a growing list of large American companies that plan to bolster their domestic jobs bases. Most recently, Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) said a deal to build commercial jets for Iran would add 100,000 jobs.
If IBM and Boeing are part of a trend promising to increase domestic workers at U.S. multinationals, the figure will stretch well into the six figures.
Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.
Latest from 24/7
