IBM Chief Executive and member of President-elect Donald Trump's Strategic and Policy forum, Ginni Rometty, wrote in USA Today on Tuesday that "leaders should focus more on connecting high-school graduates and others without four-year degrees to jobs."
Accordingly, IBM plans to hire 25,000 US workers over the course of the next four years, with around 6,000 jobs being appointed in 2017. The company also plans to invest $1 billion in employee training and development over those four years.
‘We are hiring because the nature of work is evolving – and that is also why so many of these jobs remain hard to fill,” wrote Rometty. “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.”
The announcement comes from IBM just before Trump’s meeting with members of the tech industry such as Tesla founder Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Alphabet CEO Larry Page.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member