General Electric, at one time as much of a brand name for the practice of outsourcing as it was for being a big U.S. conglomerate, is hiring people for information technology positions in the U.S, and cutting back on outsourcing, reports Bloomberg.
CEO Jeff Immelt said that GE will add more than 15,000 jobs in the next three years, and more than a thousand of them will be outside of Detroit. GE has already hired about 660 people in Michigan, according to Bloomberg.
Charlene Begley, GE’s chief information technology officer, told Bloomberg that about half of the company’s IT work was outsourced at one point, but said that the company lost a lot of its technical capabilites.
Both GE and General Motors are part of a larger trend of companies hiring people back in the United States and the United Kingdom.
The company is taking advantage of tax breaks offered to the company by Michigan, and was attracted by the skilled workforce, reports Bloomberg.
The company has been doing well this year, with India and China ordering big-ticket industrial products.
Bloomberg reports that GE has a $189 billion worth of backlog of orders, and it needs software to manage all those orders.
GE’s Begley said that ultimately having to rely on contractors to manage all that information was slowing the company down.
The news is also notable because Immelt is on President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a position that some derided since GE has historically been known to outsource so much work.
For more on GE, and how its interests line up with the U.S. economy’s (at least in the view of the Obama administration) check out this Bloomberg Businessweek‘s “Good for GE, Good for America?“
