General Motors to hire 1,000 in Arizona as it moves IT jobs in-house

IDG News Service - General Motors is hiring 1,000 IT staff for a center in a suburb of Phoenix, as part of its strategy to move more high-value IT work in-house.

The new center will join three others it has set up in Austin, Texas; Roswell, Ga., and Warren, Mich. The company said Wednesday it plans to hire more than 4,000 IT staff at the four centers over the next three to five years.

GM said in January that its center in Roswell, a northern suburb of Atlanta, would also have about 1,000 staff. Last year it said its Michigan center would hire up to 1,500 staff, while the Austin facility would hire 500.

More than 1,000 staff have already been hired at the four locations.

As part of its transition from an outsourced model to a mainly in-house model for IT services, the automaker said in October that 3,000 employees from Hewlett-Packard already working on GM's business worldwide will move to its employment rolls.

GM is planning to hire up to 10,000 IT employees in the next three to five years as it moves more IT work into the company, according to reports.

The company chose the locations for its centers based on the availability of talent locally. The four centers have access to more than 7,000 students at more than 150 colleges and universities majoring in IT-related fields, it said. Four of five students majoring in IT at higher education institutions in each state are within a three-hour drive from a GM IT center.

Staff at the centers will support GM's IT needs, including Web technologies, end-user applications and systems, dealer systems, factory systems and vehicle technology.

The new Arizona center is expected to be operational by the first quarter of 2014. GM plans to start from a temporary building in April until the permanent facility at Chandler is completed.