Working for International Business Machines: Employment, Careers, and Jobs

Working for International Business Machines: Employment, Careers,
and Jobs

If you are interested in working for the International Business Machines, IBM, this post will give you the information to help you learn a great deal about employment, careers, and jobs at the Company.

Please, read on:

International Business Machines (IBM): Company Overview

International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation is a U.S. multinational information technology company that produces and sells computer hardware, middleware and software.

IBM was established in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording (CTR) Company and in1924 was changed to “International Business Machines”.

Headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries, IBM operates through several segments such as Cognitive Solutions segment, Global Business Services segment, Technology Services & Cloud Platforms segment, Systems segment, and Global Financing segment.

Why Work for International Business Machines (IBM)

Work at IBM is more than a job. It’s calling – to build, design, consult, code, think along with clients, sell, make markets, invest, and collaborate.

You will not just do something better at the company, but attempt things you’ve never thought possible. You will develop the capacity to lead in this new era of technology and solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.

Leaders in Diversity and Inclusion

IBM strives to continually lead with their values and beliefs that enable the entire team members to develop their potential, bring their full self to the workplace, and engage in a world of inclusion.

IMB’s Culture

IBM has a culture of legacy of diversity and inclusion, which is combined with their progress to cultivate a leadership position among their technology peers and others in the business world.

Inclusive IBM

IBM’s sense of belonging and their power of inclusion build stronger teams, collaborate, and promote higher performance.

Essential IBM

IBM is changing the world by describing the next period of diversity, leveraging data, analytics, and cognitive technology for greater innovation and inclusion.

Accessible Vehicle

IBM, alongside Local Motors and CTA Foundation, create the world’s most accessible, self-driving vehicles and advance the role that technology plays in helping the aging population and people with disabilities to be more mobile and self-sufficient for as long as possible.

Mobile Voice Navigation

To Help the Blind Navigate Surroundings, IBM Research and Carnegie Mellon team up to create an Open Platform. Application NavCog turns smartphone images of the surrounding environment into a 3-D space model to help get navigation better for the visually impaired.

Cognitive Eldercare Research

IBM collaborates with the Avamere Family of Companies to run a six-month research study geared towards applying the power of IBM cognitive computing to enabling caregivers improve eldercare at senior living, nursing facilities, and health centers.

IBM Careers and Jobs

Twitter, Cisco, Apple, and Box are a few of the global partners working with IBM Global Business Services (GBS). This offers enterprises the ability to make smarter decisions and provides unparalleled client and consumer experiences through Cognitive data analytics, cloud technology, and mobile app development.

At IBM, you will have the opportunity to join a company where you can make the world work better. There are also world-class learning opportunities, mentoring and flexible work environment, and you will find a wealth of opportunities to create the career you’ve always desired.

There are no limits to the opportunities the company offers, ranging from analytics to design, development to marketing, and consulting to sales.

Explore some of IBM’s latest career and job opportunities below:

Technical Subject Matter Expert

This position leads the technical resolution of customer and IBM backup infrastructure problems after transition to stable state, and will provide Level 3/Subject Expert State support for IBM’s BaaS managed backup customers. This is achieved through troubleshoot complex issues, storage devices, and knowledge of backup platforms.

The role involves taking a leadership position with internal team and customers to resolve issues, maintain managed backup operations, and to return systems to operational status.

This role requires the capacity to build solutions to stabilize customer environments, and the basic knowledge of local area network components to support problem resolutions. The position also includes leading communication between technical teams, customer and internal organization to accomplish customer needs and fulfill a customer satisfaction.

Software Development

IBM is looking for a software developer who will work as part of the company’s Kubernetes service development team to build and support the services APIs and models. The candidate should be motivated and willing to start immediately.

Watson Health – Scrum Master

Watson Health is supported by the dynamic intelligence of Watson, proven innovation of IBM, and their collective expertise in and commitment to improving the health industry.

The convergence of technology and data is transforming life science and healthcare in every way. Participate in a growing division that supports Local, State and Federal governments to get better health and human services value, lower costs and have a meaningful impact on people’s lives through the power of cognitive insights.

As a Scrum Master, you will be responsible for facilitating daily scrum, sprint planning, sprint demo, and retrospective meetings.

You will guide the team and organize on how to use Agile/Scrum practices and values to assist in the increase of customer satisfaction, and guide the team on how to get the most out of self-organization.

Part of your duties also include guiding the team on self-organizing to fill in the intentional gaps left in the Agile/Scrum frameworks, assessing the Scrum Maturity of the team and organization and mentoring the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is comfortable and sustainable for the team and organization.

Salesforce Solution Architect

As a Salesforce Solution Architect, you will engage in pre-sales with clients to ascertain business requirements and recommend best practice solutions based on client needs.

You need to effectively prepare Business Process, Process Flow Analysis, Requirements Definition, Data Models, Configuration Workbook, Detailed Functional Design, Project Plans, and Executive Summaries.

You will also be involved in directing work of project team members by assigning duties, setting deadlines, monitoring progress, and performing applicable follow-up.

User Researcher

Working at IBM Hybrid Cloud organization requires that you work alongside many other designers and IBMers to narrate the company’s story.

Get ready as a researcher to get involved in interviews, surveys, usability assessments, design studio sessions, journey and empathy mapping, and data analysis to uncover market and user needs and expectations.

IBM team of established User Researchers have had years of deep research expertise and brilliant hires using new tools and methodologies.

Firewall Administrator

In this field, you will be responsible to work with a group of security professionals in a shift rotation, which involves working day or night periods, weekdays, weekends and holidays, and some on-call availability.

As a Firewall Administrator, you are also required tp perform the day-to-day operation of firewalls, both traditional and next generation, including firewall device health and availability management, service-level reporting, and responding to security events and event mitigations.

IBM Training and Development Programs

According to a recent LinkedIn research, 57% leaders say that soft skills are more vital than hard skills. One of the examples of soft skills is the ability to work effectively, from presentation to collaborations skills. However, in today’s labor market candidate pools, it is becoming harder to find soft skills.

IBM has gone ahead to find solution to the problem by launching free professional skills training modules. The training program enables participants to acquire core soft skills required in the modern workforce. These online courses are part of a new Professional Skills category on IBM’s training website, and interested candidates can access them online on the IBM Skills Gateway.

Each of the courses takes less than two hours and is available today. Have a look below:

Collaborate Effectively

The Collaborate Effectively course was designed to help you develop skills and behavior needed to improve the way you collaborate with your team, Business Partners, other IBMers and clients.

Presenting with Purpose

In this course, you will be able to build skills and behaviors needed to confidently and successfully create and deliver presentations.

Interpersonal Skills

This is a course aimed to help you develop skills and behaviors required to become effective in communication, make a lasting impact, and deal challenges in a controlled and focused way.

Delivering Quality Work with Agility

This course will help you to learn an approach that will enable you to be agile while working professionally to deliver quality and experience to clients.

Problem-solving with Critical and Creative Thinking

By using a systematic five-step process, you will learn to solve problems and implement solutions more successfully and in an agile way.

IBM Student Internship Program and Recruitment Process

With more than 400,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries, IBM proves to be the largest technology and consulting employer in the world.

IBM offers a wide collection of technology and consulting services; world’s most advanced servers and supercomputers; and a broad portfolio of middleware for collaboration, predictive analytics, software development and systems management.

It is the dream of every tech lover to work with such a reputed and experienced company like IBM. It is not too hard to be an intern at IBM, neither is it too easy to find your way through the recruitment process. The entire process is explained in detail.

Types of Internship

There are different types of internship programs that IBM offers. These include:

• All about IBM and Cognitive computing
• IBM student developer community
• Extreme Blue at IBM
• The Bright Blue
• Early Professional Sellers Program

Eligibility

Before you can be eligible for an internship at IBM, you need to have problem solving and teamwork skills and you must be pursuing a scientific, technical, numerical degree. Coding is a must-know and a talent in programming is an added advantage.

IBM also offers an opportunity in the field of research. The famous IBM research laboratories provide summer internship each year.

How to Apply

There are three means of applying for the internship at IBM.

Through the Company’s Website

The primary way of applying is to visit the company’s website at https://www.ibm.com/us-en/ and apply through it. You will find the ‘careers’ tab at the right corner below the website, and apply by going to the ‘careers’ tab.

Through Campus Drives

IBM visits some of the reputed institutions and colleges to hire interested candidates for the internship. If your college is not included, contact your Training and Placement Cell and ask them to contact the concerned department at IBM to reach your college for the purpose.

Through Referral

If there is anybody you have who works inside IBM and knows in & out at the company, you can ask them to forward your resume to the HR department of the company. Thus, you will get an advantage over the others.

The Interview

After posting the application process, if you get shortlisted IBM’s recruitment team for the interview process will contact you. Perhaps, you will be asked for a telephonic interview which will determine your chance to make it through. The team could ask you for a face-to-face or Skype interview. So be ready accordingly.

Your interview will mainly consist of the questions ranging from basic introduction to complex programming. The questions may be to predict the output of a given program or your programming skills could be tested. The questions will be of both conceptual and numerical type, so don’t fail to remember to go through the different programming languages so as to make an impact.

Benefits

Once you’ve made it through the screening process, you will get selected and will have to work in a team on a certain project. However, you are also entitled to the following benefits.

• Pre-Placement offer
• Work from home opportunity
• Flexible working hours
• One time allowance for accommodation, conveyance and boarding
• Competitive remuneration in the form of a monthly salary

IBM Corporate Culture and Values

By definition, a culture is a characteristic difference that keeps one group of people apart from another. As a result of cultural differences for example, we sometimes attribute differences in the way the English acts as opposed to the Spanish.

IBM makes its organizational culture parallel with business goals for leadership in the information technology industry. The corporate or organizational culture defines the principles, philosophies and values that influence the behaviors of employees.

In addition, the cultural characteristics influence human resource support for the firm’s efforts to respond to opportunities and threats in the external business environment. For instance, in IBM’s case the corporate culture affects employees and extends to other parties like business partners.

As a major technology company in the global market, IBM needs to maximize the benefits of its organizational culture, such as in terms of using the influence of cultural attributes to motivate workers or IBMers in contributing to further business development despite challenges and issues, like competitive rivalry, which is determinable in the Porter’s Five Forces Analysis of IBM. This situation sheds light about the role of the corporate culture as a key factor in the long-term success of the company.

In IBM’s management, cultural features are significant consideration especially because of their influence on human resource and, thus, performance of the whole business. The organizational culture, for instance, affects decision-making in all levels and areas of Big Blue (IBM’s nickname).

Types and Characteristics of IBM’s Organizational Culture

IBM has an organizational culture of “think”, which is an organizational culture that is based on Thomas J. Watson Sr.’s work to integrate the company, which was formerly called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording (CTR) Company, formed from the amalgamation of four companies.

The aim was to merge the entire organization and make sure there was long-term success. Watson endeavored to create the foundation for IBM’s current corporate culture of “think”.

Based on the results of the 2003 ValuesJam, the cultural characteristics have been formally redefined, which was the company’s way of establishing key values through the participation of employees. However, presently the following elements are most notable in IBM’s corporate culture:

Radical Thinking

Radical Thinking has a major influence in IBM’s development through its more than 100 years of operations in the information technology industry. Employees are encourages by managers to engage in thinking that has the capacity to disrupt the status quo and deviate from traditional ways in the business.

The corporate culture fosters creative and innovative thinking that leads to technological breakthroughs, which reflects IBM’s vision and mission statements respectively. For instance, the company introduced the IBM System/360 based on contributions from radical-thinking employees, which was the first easily upgradable computing system family for customers, especially businesses.

Dedication to Every Client’s Success

As this feature of the organizational culture focuses on client’s needs, employees’ decisions are guided for business development. IBM, in relation, intends to maintain high quality customer service to address the needs of the information technology business.

This cultural feature specifies the importance of customer relations in gauging business success. As identified in the PESTEL/PESTLE analysis of IBM, the concern on customer service quality is a socio-cultural external factor relevant in the industry. For instance, based on product effectiveness and quality of service, customers are more likely to develop a favorable perspective of and response to the company. Thus, this characteristic of IBM’s corporate culture supports business objectives for customer loyalty and a growing and stable share of the market.

Innovation that Matters – for IBM Corporation and for the Entire Global Circle

The Company’s corporate culture also focuses on meeting the demand of the market by developing superior products,. This is one of the Company’s intensive strategies for growth and competitive advantage.

This cultural attribute points to excellence as a key success factor in the information technology business to ensure that innovation matters. Excellent computer systems, for instance, provide long-term benefit to customers in terms of solving their business problems.

The organizational culture, thus, contributes to the value of the company’s brand, which is one of the business strengths identifiable in the SWOT analysis of IBM.

Trust and Personal Responsibility in All Relationships

This cultural characteristic encourages personal responsibility, trust and respect for the individual. These factors affect relationships that involve IBM employees, business partners, suppliers, etc.

The company expects benefits to the business through this element of the organizational culture. Such trust and respect, for instance, lead to positive relationships that support high employee morale and stronger alliances with business partners. This leads to IBM’s corporate culture contributing to business resilience regardless of challenges linked to competition in the information technology industry.

IBM Job Application – How to Start a Career (the Hiring Process)

Here is the process to follow if you intend to apply for jobs at IBM.

StartWire

Through your StartWire account, you can search and apply for jobs at IBM directly. When you apply through StartWire, they will give you immediate access to a suite of free job search tools that you can use to keep your job search as organized and effective as possible.

Apply Online

There is also an option to apply for jobs through IBM’s hiring website. If you choose to apply through their website instead of StartWire, remember to return to StartWire and tell them about your application so they can help you maintain accurate record of where and when you have applied. According to studies, keeping your job search organized is one of the most essential factors when getting a job. Therefore, StartWire will provide you with the tools you need to do that.

IBM Application Process

It’s possible that your application could be a bit different depending on the position you apply for, although all applications look exactly alike.

You will need to register on IBM’s hiring website before you can fill out the online application. At registration, you will need to provide your name, email address, an account password, and answers to two security questions.

You will be able to begin the application once your account is created. You will have the option to connect your application to your Facebook or LinkedIn account when you start. You shouldn’t bother if you are not comfortable making the social connection as this is wholly optional.

Nonetheless, IBM will pull in your account information and use it to fill in many of the application fields for you if you choose to use your social accounts. This feature saves much time and it’s worth trying if you are comfortable with the idea.

You will be required, during the application, to provide many different pieces of personal information including your name, home address, email address, phone number, education summary, work history, job qualifications, travel and relocation preferences, and languages spoken.

You should make sure that you have all of this information on hand (including accurate employment and education dates) before you begin the application. IBM will very likely verify the dates with your school and your employer before making a job offer. Providing inaccurate dates can slow down or completely stop the hiring process. Therefore, ensure you take some time to verify those requirements.

To determine your eligibility for the position, you will be asked some job-specific questions. For example, if your application is on Web Development you will be asked about your proficiency with HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and other common web languages.

Resume and Cover Letter

You will have the opportunity to provide your resume and cover letter at the end of the application. You will want to customize both documents for IBM and the position that you are applying for if you haven’t already. This is your chance to explain why you are passionate about working for IBM and how your previous experiences have prepared you for the position you want.

Getting Updates on Your IBM Application

If you have already applied for a job and would like to find out where you stand, you will need to contact human resources directly because IBM does not provide automatic application updates at this time. Don’t get annoyed or discouraged. Maintain a positive attitude even though it’s hard to do so.

Who is IBM Hiring?

As an equal opportunity employer, IBM hires everybody.

Available Jobs at IBM

There are too many jobs at IBM that cannot be listed here, but most of them can be organized into the following categories:

• Finance
• Consulting
• Accounting
• Hardware Engineering
• Information Technology
• Human Resources
• Telecommunications
• Marketing
• Legal
• Operations
• Marketing
• Sales
• Research
• Software Development

There are positions available for people from many different areas of interest and levels of experience because IBM is such a large and diverse company.

Check back regularly to learn about new positions as they are announced if you are passionate about working for IBM.

Benefits and Compensation for Working with IBM

IBM offers a competitive benefits program, designed to help employees build a solid financial foundation and meet a diverse range of needs.

IBM benefits programs include:

Health Benefits Portfolio

Through the Health Benefits Portfolio, the Company provides strong support for employee well-being and preventive care. It offers comprehensive coverage to meet a collection of medical situations, and solid protection against the cost of severe illness or injury.

Retirement Program

This benefits program helps to build future financial security through the 401(k) Plus Plan and other capital accumulation programs.

Income Protection

This program is intended in case of severe illness, injury or death such as life insurance and disability benefits.

Leisure

This offers you the opportunity to follow leisure pursuits through vacation and holiday programs.

IBM Work/Life Balance

The Work/Life Balance at IBM is rated a C by 499 employees putting it in the Bottom 45% of similar size companies in the US. 72% of IBM employees are satisfied with their work/life balance while 48% feel they are burnt out.

About 47% of the employees at IBM work eight hours or less, while 5% of them have a very long day – longer than twelve hours. The greater part of IBM employees are satisfied with their work/life balance and do not feel burnt out.

In general, employees in the Communications department and employees in the Finance department believe they have good work/life balance while employees in the Legal department and employees in the Admin department think there is room for improvement.

Conclusion

This post helps increase your knowledge of issues relating to employment, careers, and jobs at International Business Machines, IBM, if you are looking to work there.

If you find this post helpful in finding out about jobs, careers, and employment at IBM, kindly leave a comment in the box below. You can also share any experience you’ve had with IBM if you are or had been an employee of the company.

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