IBM is planning to hire 25,000 workers in the U.S. and investing $1 billion in retraining and developing its workforce in the next four years. The technology giant is also looking to get support from president-elect Donald Trump in providing better training for American workers.
According to USA Today, Ginni Rometty, IBM's CEO, said that they are intending to hire professionals in the U.S. in the next four years, with 6,000 workers expected to be hired in 2017. But she is also hoping President-elect Trump will listen about better ways to train workers.
"At IBM alone, we have thousands of open positions at any given moment," she said. "We are hiring because the nature of work is evolving - and that is also why so many of these jobs remain hard to fill."
Aside from hiring workers, the tech giant is also looking to retrain and develop its current workforce in the U.S. and will be investing $1 billion to make it happen. She will also be advocating the benefits of the reauthorizing the Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, a legislation that is currently held up in the Senate.
If the legislation is passed, funding will be provided for technical and vocational education. The education could help workers retrain for more technical jobs.
Rometty said that one-third of IBM's employees doesn't actually have four-year degrees. She adds that 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."
Bloomberg reports that IBM has already been preparing their vision for training for months. Rometty said that the dynamics of the global labor market have changed and this resulted in a lot of unfilled tech-related jobs in the U.S.
She adds that the disconnect is due to the lack of qualified people for the job. That's why she has been advocating for a better way to train people in the U.S. that would make them qualified for these jobs. For more news about the job market, visit Jobs&Hire.
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