International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) is planning to hire 25,000 workers in the United States.
The IBM hiring announcement was made by CEO Ginni Rometty in an op-ed in USA Today. The CEO says the company will hire those 25,000 employees over the next four years. She also claims that the company will invest $1 billion to train its United States employees during this time.
According to Rometty, IBM will add 6,000 of the new 25,000 employees to its workforce in 2017. She says that the company has many positions to fill and that it needs employees with training in them. She calls these “new collar” jobs.
Rometty says that IBM needs a new approach for new collar jobs. This is why the tech company is looking at hiring workers with two-year degrees that may have additional training through vocational programs. It also has an interest in Pathways in Technology Early College High School institutions, which train students for six years to acquire specific skills.
“Most of all, to create new collar jobs we will need new kinds of collaboration – involving federal and state governments, public school systems, community colleges and private business, across multiple industries,” Rometty says in her USA Today op-ed. “We will not always agree, but progress in job creation will come from open discussion and engagement.”
Rometty is part of President-elect Donald Trump’s business leaders advisory panel. Trump is holding a summit that will focus on jobs today in New York with members from this panel. The panel also includes Facebook Inc’s (NASDAQ:FB) Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOG,GOOGL) Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, and Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Jeff Bezos, reports Bloomberg.
