General Motors (GM) will hire around 1,000 “high-tech” workers to staff a new information technology innovation centre near Atlanta. The automaker said it needs software developers, project managers, database experts, business analysts and other IT professionals for the third of four centres in the United States.
“Locating this centre in Atlanta makes good business sense,” said GM chief information officer Randy Mott in a statement. “We can draw from a deep pool of high tech expertise through the surrounding colleges, universities and talent residing in the area.”
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GM already has hired about 700 IT specialists to work at the innovation centres in Austin, Texas, and Warren, Michigan. Three of four candidates offered jobs to date have accepted them.
The Atlanta centre will be located in Roswell, a northern suburb of Atlanta.
The automaker is making a comeback in metro Atlanta four years after closing its Doraville plant, lured partly by US$20 million in incentives, the Atlanta Journal Constitution noted.
“This innovation centre is exactly the kind of employer we want in the state,” said Georgia governor Nathan Deal. “The information age will be with us for a long time, and attracting companies such as GM that are on the cutting edge of manufacturing and technology is a huge win for Georgia.”
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By GlobalDataMott is leading a “rebalancing of information technology” at GM under which the majority of IT work will be done by GM employees instead of being outsourced, which has been the GM model for most of the last three decades, the automaker said.
“We look to the innovation centres to design and deliver IT that drives down the cost of ongoing operations while continuously increasing the level and speed at which innovative products and services are available to GM customers,” Mott said.
“The IT innovation centres are critical to our overall GM business strategy and IT transformation.”
“Not only is it 1,000 jobs, but they’re high-paying jobs,” Deal told the Journal Constitution. “These are the types of jobs Georgia can be proud of.”
The papewr said the deal came together over eight months and the centre is expected to open in March. The state incentives funds include $17.5m in job tax credits and another $2.5m from the state REBA fund, a pot used for closing major economic development deals.
It’s far less than the state used to seal other deals, the report added. Georgia offered up $78m in state incentives plus a workforce training programme to land a pharmaceutical plant last year that will employ 1,500 by 2018. And the state used $45m in tax credits and grants to lure a massive Caterpillar plant to the Athens area.
Officials said it’s a reflection of GM’s desire to locate there because of the high-trained workforce from Georgia Tech and other local educational institutions.
Georgia is also home to a Kia car plant opened several years ago and since expanded.
The location of the fourth GM IT site will be announced later.
