CHANDLER, AZ — Hundreds of General Motors employees who are losing their jobs attended a job fair Thursday in the East Valley.
The City of Chandler organized the job fair exclusively for the 900+ GM workers who were alerted last month that their positions were being eliminated. Chandler Chamber of Commerce and Arizona @ Work also provided services.
“As part of GM’s continued transformation, and to better align our Innovation Center footprint and IT resources in the US, we have made the decision to cease our IT operation at our Chandler, AZ, Innovation Center later this year. Employees working in our software-defined vehicle teams will remain in AZ. Affected employees will have an opportunity to apply for open positions," the company wrote in a statement last month.
Seeing a shoulder-to-shoulder room of job seekers could be a little intimidating, especially after losing a job a few weeks ago, But prospective employees like Brandon Caffie came prepared – in part, with color-coordinated folders for each possible employer.
“I already gave away a few of them, and they were impressed,” he said.
Caffie is one of nearly a thousand people who were surprised at the news back in August that the Arizona IT innovation center was closing after nearly a decade. And the high-paying GM jobs were going with it.
”I was kind of like in shock, didn’t know how to feel,” said Ashley Aguayo, a project manager and portfolio analyst at GM.
Dan Gregory Deschamps, a senior manager at GM, is doing all he can for his team now looking for work.
“I’m on the street and looking for a new opportunity,” he added.
He says the very day the news of job loss came down, the city of Chandler and surrounding East Valley cities were calling to try and help keep as much tech talent as possible in the area.
”These are significant contributors to our economy, they’re the coaches of the baseball teams, we didn’t want to lose these people to other cities,” said Deschamps.
A total of 25 employers showed up at Chandler Gilbert Community College. Many of them local, like Salt River Project (SRP) or Garmin. There was no shortage of tech qualifications in the room.
”We absolutely focus on software development we have every technical stack to think of as you can imagine for a Fortune 20 company, if there’s another large or small company, we have that talent,” said Deschamps.
For the GM employees, the pink slips will go into effect at the end of October. The city is already listening to prospective new tenants for the Arizona IT Innovation Center.
The job fair partnered with a number of companies to match the workers with new IT and software-related positions.
