IBM Promises To Hire 25,000 Americans As Tech Executives Set To Meet Trump (reuters.com)

IBM Chief Executive Ginni Rometty has pledged to "hire about 25,000 professionals in the next four years in the United States" as she and other technology executives prepared to meet with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday. Reuters reports: IBM had nearly 378,000 employees at the end of 2015, according to the company's annual report. While the firm does not break out staff numbers by country, a review of government filings suggests IBM's U.S. workforce declined in each of the five years through 2015. When asked why IBM planned to increase its U.S. workforce after those job cuts, company spokesman Ian Colley said in an email that Rometty had laid out the reasons in her USA Today piece. Her article did not acknowledge that IBM had cut its U.S. workforce, although it called on Congress to quickly update the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act that governs federal support for vocational education. "We are hiring because the nature of work is evolving," she said. "As industries from manufacturing to agriculture are reshaped by data science and cloud computing, jobs are being created that demand new skills -- which in turn requires new approaches to education, training and recruiting." She said IBM intended to invest $1 billion in the training and development of U.S. employees over the next four years. Pratt declined to say if that represented an increase over spending in the prior four years.

Comments

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll buy 50 companies with an average of 1000 US workers each, then lay half of them off.

25,000 Americans as Tech Executives

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Trump have time to meet with every one of them? That's a lot of executives!

Re:There's always a catch

[CaptainDork]

The answer is blowing in the wind. ~ Bob Dylan

I was a suit at Mobil Oil in the IT department.

They kicked us all out and hired "contract" people.

The people in Dallas walked across the street to Kodak.

I got an email from my replacement(s) asking me questions like the password for this and that and asking how the spaghetti code tied the mainframe into the local area networks tying Beaumont, Dallas, and Reston together via a T1 with Unix boxes (ca. 1996).

I had the complete list of email addresses at the time and I replied with .cc to the big players, including Fairfax, that, "Mobil Oil has made certain business "rightsizing" decisions and I fully support the corporation's new direction and we should all begin, immediately, to trust the expertise of the "best of breed" new players that were selected to work within the new paradigm."

I got some calls from my former managers and had lots of fun with that.

I found a new job in four days.