New Hope
2004 has begun in a ray of great hope. The jobs market news has been good. For instance IBM has just announced that it will hire 15,000 new employees this year – 50% more than it had intended to. They name the IT growth areas.
According to their Chief Financial Officer, “”2004 will be the year when the IT industry will begin its next growth cycle””.
That‘s great news for all of those who work in the industry. We could do with a good year after 3 bad years.
Net Hires
Although IBM plan to send 3,000 US jobs offshore to developing countries in 2004, they claim that there will be a net gain of 4,500 new jobs in the US.
I presume that means that they will be creating 7,500 new jobs in the US, using 3,000 of their current workforce and hiring a further 4,500.
It looks then, at least as far as one of the major IT firms are concerned, that over the next few years, more jobs will be created by the recovery in the economy than will be sent offshore.
It looks like IBM will be creating 5 new jobs in the US for every 2 that they will be sending offshore.
This is what we have been seeing in the UK over the last 6 months or so, with the number of job adverts going up much faster than jobs are being sent overseas.
New Skills
So where are all these new jobs coming from?
IBM says that they will be hiring them for work in 3 main areas:-
1) Software for doing business over the internet
2) Services to support wireless technology
3) Linux operating system
IBM only decided to up the number of new hires from 10,000 to 15,000 in the last few weeks. Let‘s hope that there are more rises announced later in the year.
It is good news for graduates as IBM intends to raise the percentage of new graduates hired from 40% to 50%.
In 2005 they intend to raise this percentage again from 50% to 60%.
