LONDON (ShareCast) - (ShareCast News) - IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty has said that the tech giant plans to hire 25,000 employees in the next four years, as well as spending $1bn on the training and development of new staff.
Along with dozens of Silicon Valley leaders, the Big Blue CEO will attend a summit on Wednesday hosted by president-elect Donald Trump.

In an article published by USA Today, Rometty said that the hiring spree will come about because the nature of the company's operations are always changing, but she did not say whether they would be offset by other reductions.

"At IBM alone, we have thousands of open positions at any given moment, and we intend to hire about 25,000 professionals in the next four years in the United States, 6,000 of those in 2017," she said.

"We are hiring because the nature of work is evolving - and that is also why so many of these jobs remain hard to fill."

Wednesday's meeting at Trump Tower is likely to be fraught with a certain amount of confrontation, after many of the tech leaders expressed serious reservations about the future of the industry in the event of the Republican winning the presidential election.

Now that that has become a reality, the likes of Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg will have to engage in collaboration with Trump, though he has relaxed many of his former hard line stances since defeating Hillary Clinton in last month's election.

IBM is one of a number of companies who are wary of Trump's plans to heavily tax those who shift jobs overseas, and Rometty added that the development of workers is key in order to keep jobs in the country.

"What matters most is that these employees - with jobs such as cloud computing technicians and services delivery specialists - have relevant skills, often obtained through vocational training," she wrote.

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