IBM Hiring In Detroit: Several Hundred Jobs Over 5 Years?

IBM is looking to add "multiple" positions at its 7-month-old applications-delivery center on the campus of Michigan State University and a local newspaper says the company might ultimately be looking to add "several hundred" new jobs at the center over the next five years.Let's separate what we know from what is currently only speculation. Here are the facts:

**IBM is hosting a job fair on Monday, April 26 at a TechExpo event the Engineering Society of Detroit. You can get more details here.

**IBM says it is "looking for multiple individuals with the following skill for our East Lansing Delivery Center," and offers this list of qualifications: web developers, legacy developers, DBAs, data-warehousing specialists, Lotus Notes developers, SAP developers, business systems analysts, software testing specialists, IT project team leads, systems administrators, and data security analysts.

**IBM says a 1-2 years of professional experience is required, and that a Bachelor's degree is preferred for the range of full-time positions it is seeking to fill.

And now for the speculation: the website of the Detroit Free Press has an article about the job fair that says IBM's Detroit facility might be hiring hundreds of people over the next five years, but the article offers no substantiation or backup for that claim. Here's an excerpt from that article:

IBM is one of a few companies that's begun opening these U.S.-based global-delivery centers in areas around the country with relatively low costs of labor and living, and/or near universities. Around the time IBM opened its Lansing facility, a startup company called Systems In Motion said it expects to open multiple such centers over several years, with the first being just down the road from Lansing in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

We wrote about that in October in a column called Global CIO: New Tech Firm Hiring Hundreds In U.S. To Take On The World.

And earlier this year, in a column about HP and IBM opening up services centers in small towns and cities around the U.S., we asked about the tradeoffs these communities face when they offer big companies tens of millions of dollars in subsidies to attract maybe 400 jobs: Global CIO: IBM Iowa's Birthday: IBM Gets $52M, But What Does Iowa Get?.