A day before meeting with Donald Trump, IBM CEO announced the company's plans to hire additional 25,000 employees specifically in the U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump is hosting a tech summit in his New York Trump Tower later today, where he invited all key Silicon Valley tech bosses like Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) Tim Cook, Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) Jeff Bezos, Facebook's (NASDAQ: FB) Mark Zuckerberg and many others. The idea of Trump hosting this kind of a summit was met with a surprise as almost all tech companies were closely working with President Obama and provided major funds for Hillary Clinton's election campaign, said Recode. However, the president-elect, together with his main supporter and Paypal founder Peter Thiel, invited top tech executives to talk about the U.S. economy and the issue of American jobs.
IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty, also one of the summit's attendees, issued a statement on USA Today yesterday explaining her company's stance on workforce. Considering that IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been criticized over the last years for cutting thousands of jobs in the U.S. and hiring additional employees in India, Rometty's statement coming out less than 24 hours before Trump's summit seems to be the company's first step towards partnering with the president-elect.
"At IBM alone, we have thousands of open positions at any given moment, and we intend to hire about 25,000 professionals in the next four years in the United States, 6,000 of those in 2017. IBM will also invest $1 billion in training and development of our U.S. employees in the next four years," she wrote in the statement via USA Today.
By the end of 2015, the company reported to employ about 378,000 people worldwide, which is significantly lower than the 2012 headcount of 434,400 employees, reports MarketWatch. Rometty, who is also a member of Trump's advisory panel, emphasized the importance of preparing tech professionals, which she called "new collar" employees, and said that the majority of these 25,000 jobs would go to the people possessing these "relevant skills" rather than a university degree.
"But in many other cases, new collar jobs may not require a traditional college degree. In fact, 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. 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."
IBM's announcement is likely to be discussed at Trump's tech summit starting in New York in a few hours.