With a 3,000-strong workforce already working at IBM, Ireland, the news of 800 additional jobs is a surprisingly pleasant one from the American multinational tech firm.
IBM, Ireland, which is said to be amongst the biggest employers in the country, is reportedly working towards creating advanced software driven by artificial intelligence (AI).
In the last 10 years, Ireland’s labour market has seen a doubling in the number in the number of people employed by multinationals. In fact, 11 per cent of the labour force is working for such multinationals.
The jobs in MNCs were only affected last year for the first time in the last 15 years, due to widespread downsizing by firms in the sector.
Meanwhile, IBM is undergoing significant internal restructuring, as revealed in its recent quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts. Martin Schroeter, CFO, IBM, revealed an expenditure of $200 million charge for ‘workforce rebalancing’. This exercise reportedly involve shifting and laying off employees, in addition to retraining and reallocating staff to growth areas such as cloud computing and analytics.
In the first week of May, it was hinted that the reorganization will also witness the hiring of over 2,000 incremental resources in mobility practices. Furthermore, it was indicated that there may be a possible shift of almost 1,000 individuals to analytics projects. At the time, IBM had revealed that it was looking at ‘alternative labour models’ to optimise costs. That means, strategies such as hiring of contractors or offshoring jobs could not be ruled out.
