Ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's meeting with tech bosses Wednesday, IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty announced plans to hire 25,000 new employees and invest $1 billion in training and development for employees over the next four years.
Rometty, who is a member of Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, is slated to join Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Alphabet Inc.'s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, for a jobs-focused meeting with Trump in New York.
While Rometty claims her company's plans were in place prior to Trump's election, the timing of her four-year plan is curious. What's more, it's plausible she might not feel quite the same pressure to act on this four-year plan if not for Trump's no-nonsense approach on securing American jobs and his recent success with Carrier and U.S. Steel. Bloomberg adds:
Rometty is continuing what is emerging as a formula among technology companies: in conjunction with meetings with Trump in his Manhattan tower, pledge to create jobs and invest billions of dollars in the U.S., even if the plans had already been in the works since before he was elected. The advantage for companies is that it can deflect criticism from the new administration that the industry is shifting jobs offshore, while also giving Trump a way to take credit for job creation goals that may have little to do with his election.
IBM said in March it had more than 25,000 positions open globally and that it had started to cut some jobs in the U.S. as part of a “workforce rebalancing” in an effort to add staff with cloud and other specific skills.
Over the past few years, IBM -- like many large U.S.-based companies -- has been criticized for eliminating thousands of jobs in the country and moving resources to places such as India. The company reported fewer employees at the end of 2013 than the beginning of the year for the first time in a decade, and reduced its total workforce by 12 percent the next year. IBM said it hired more U.S. employees last year than it had in the five years prior.
In an OpEd for USA Today Tuesday, Rometty said that due to the changing-nature of technology and the skills required to meet the demands certain positions, "jobs are hard to fill."
"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."
Rometty added that "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" and that all that matters are skills, regardless of how or where they are acquired.
To that end, she writes that IBM has designed "a new educational model that many other companies have embraced – six-year public high schools combining a relevant traditional curriculum with necessary skills from community colleges, mentoring and real-world job experience."
"With increased national focus on relevant career and technical education – with Congress and the Administration playing a key role – we could build a national corps of hundreds of thousands of skilled workers ready for the new collar jobs employers have open today," Rometty states in her article.
