Jeff Immelt: Hiring the right people

We have probably hired, since we started this, a couple thousand data scientists and people like that. That’s going to continue to grow and multiply. What we’ve found is we’ve got to hire new product managers, different kinds of commercial people. It’s going to be in the thousands.

So what you’re going to do is you’re going to blend them with the GE team, and then we’re going to recruit differently. When we go to college campuses, we’re going to look for different skills. We’re going to put them in different training programs. It’s a combination of we’ve got to bring our culture along, but that’s not enough. We’ve got to bring thousands of people in from the outside. That’s the only way we’re going to get there fast enough. 

This is something I got wrong. I thought it was all about technology. I thought if we hired a couple thousand technology people, if we upgraded our software, things like that, that was it. I was wrong. Product managers have to be different; salespeople have to be different; on-site support has to be different. We’ve had to drill and change a lot about the company. And I just think it’s infecting everything we do. It’s infecting our own IT. It’s infecting our own manufacturing plants. It’s infected everything we’re doing, I think in a positive way.

Reference: GE’s Jeff Immelt on digitizing in the industrial space.