Dive Brief:
- Before a scheduled meeting with President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty announced the company’s plans to hire 25,000 tech workers in the U.S., says Bloomberg Technology. Rometty joined other business leaders on Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a business advisory panel.
- Bloomberg reports that just last March IBM had 25,000 job openings around the world and started cutting some U.S. jobs in what the company called a “workforce rebalancing.” The tech giant had faced criticism for sending jobs abroad.
- Rometty, like other U.S. business leaders, came out with her pledge to keep some jobs at home as a run-up to her Wednesday meeting with Trump, who made keeping American jobs in the U.S. a focus of his presidential campaign.
Dive Insight:
Whether U.S. business leaders would have discontinued shipping jobs offshore had Trump not won the presidency isn’t known. But their pledges to keep some jobs in the states is good news for American workers, nonetheless.
Recruiters may find IBM’s focus on training workers for jobs in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and cloud computing especially intriguing. Filling jobs in these areas has been difficult, and training workers for these jobs is essential to employers’ recruiting and hiring efforts.
