GM to hire 10K IT workers, cut outsourcing

General Motors (GM) will look to hire about 10,000 IT workers worldwide over the next 3 to 5 years as it aims to "rebalance" its employment model and work to conduct 90 percent of all tech projects in-house by then.

The automobile company said in a statement last Friday it is looking to hire up to 500 new employees in Texas, United States, for its IT innovation center which opened last week. Positions it is looking to fill include software developer, project managers, databvase experts, business analysts and other IT professionals, it revealed.

"We want IT to keep up with the imagination of our GM business partners, and to do that, we plan to rebalance the employment model over the next three years so that the majority of our IT work is done by GM employees focused on extending new capabilities that further enable our business, said Randy Mott, the company's CIO, in the statement.

This 500 positions is part of a wider recruitment effort to bolster its internal IT capabilities, which is still being crafted, according to Mott in a separate report by Bloomberg Businessweek. Asked if he would be hiring more than 10,000 workers, he said it would be within "that range but less than that".

He added the carmaker plans to bring most of its IT work in-house, from 10 percent currently to 90 percent in the next few years.

Computerworld stated in its report last Friday GM was used to relying heavily on outsourcing companies to run its global IT for several years. Electronic Data System (EDS), which was once owned by GM before being spun off and acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2008, was one of the main beneficiaries of its outsourcing policy, the report noted.