"The tech company is looking for different ways to fill “new-collar” jobs in its 360,000-employee workforce by adding digital badges and apprenticeships and deepening partnerships with community colleges."
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/10/29/interview-ibm-official-about-companys-new-collar-push-look
There always posting those digital badges on Linkedin. Ugh. It's just embarrassing.
@1fky not true at all. I volunteer for campus recruiting and I can say we get highly qualified talent. The problem is that with the aggressive offshoring, we have no work to give to entry level staff and a vicious cycle begins. Have you heard about the criteria for offshoring jobs? Anything and everything you would give to entry level staff to help them learn, from PMO and BA work in GBS or GTS to testing, change requests, and bug fixing in SWG or Cloud, is the type of work that we must give to offshore. This is enforced by the solutioning process and by the budget approval process. I’ve had to fight a GM in order to get one entry level consultant on a $300K project instead of offshore staff. These entry level employees see this and tell their friends, who in turn avoid IBM. And let’s not forget the debacle with new hire start dates in GBS last year too. My alma mater refused to permit IBM recruiting this year because of the complaints.
Pay packages for software engineers are lower than FAANG in Silicon Valley, but not by that much. Plus when you consider that not everyone gets a job there, still there are highly qualified students who would come to IBM but choose not to based on what they have heard.
1fky. I think you are absolutely correct. Most of the traditional HW vendors (IBM, HP, Intel, Cisco, etc ) are all in the same boat. Kids graduating are not interested in going to work for them. Far newer and more dynamic companies are hiring. I believe IBM MAY (Note I said may) enter into their thinking due to the purchase of Redhat, but I still think, it’s a long shot. At my nieces graduation last Summer (Cal Poly) not a one of her classmates that I chatted with had interviewed with the traditional HW vendors. Almost all of them had offers with approx 50% going to companies that I would say are start ups. The others were going to the the current cloud gang (Facebook, google, Microsoft, and amazon). What surprised me were the offers they got. Very aggressive dollar wise, but far more than a 40 hour week was required
Badges?!? We don't need no stinking badges!
IBM badges and patents are a joke. Anyone can obtain them without anything upstairs.
This is because IBM (US, not sure about the other GEOs) can't get enough grads from decent universities to work for them. So they have to get creative. And if they save a few bucks in the process, so much the better.
Badges are an embarrassment. Gold star for doing well on the quiz. Juvenile, meaningless, and inappropriate in a professional environment.
Back in the early 2000s, my company (not IBM) did a program like this. We got money from the state and the government for training and students got opportunities to work for a big corporate. We got some great IT talent through the door in that way and although the success rates were only around 10%, we didn’t care because it was seen as community goodwill. Many other companies did a similar program in my state and the success rate was similarly low across the board. That being said, the program was disbanded after the economic crash because the company no longer felt they could afford it.
In 2019, corporate values have changed entirely. Make no mistake about it- IBM is doing this to get cheaper employees not to give opportunities to the community. They should be aware of the low success rates of these programs though. It will be a lot of money and resources wasted eventually written off as “goodwill.” Willing to bet money on it.
Digital badges are a joke, you can earn them without knowing anything