Tech-services firm Cognizant plans 500 jobs at Mesa office

Cognizant, a Fortune 500 company that provides an array of technology services to corporate customers, is opening a new office in Mesa, bringing 500 jobs to the city.

The expansion will boost Cognizant’s Arizona workforce to nearly 3,000 employees. The company already has operations in Phoenix and Chandler.

Hiring has begun in Mesa, with the company intending to fill the 500 or so jobs within 12 to 18 months, said Eric Westphal, Cognizant’s senior director of global corporate affairs who attended a ceremony Thursday for the new facility in Mesa.

In addition, Cognizant announced a partnership with Maricopa Corporate College to provide training in technical and digital-economy jobs at no cost to students selected to participate.

“We plan to train 250 individuals over the next 12 months,” Westphal said. Applicants aren’t required to have a bachelor’s or even an associate degree.

The courses, which start this fall, will focus on application support and infrastructure services. More information on the program is at ttps://info.maricopacorporate.com/cognizant.

Cognizant provides various services to help cus-

tomers apply technology to transform their operations.

Its clients include financial and health-care companies, along with those in retail, manufacturing, energy, utilities, communications, technology and other industries. The company didn’t disclose the names of corporate clients being served from the Mesa facility.

Cognizant started in 1994 as an informationtechnology unit of Dun & Bradstreet, then was spun off in 1996. It counted 260,000 employees at the end of 2017 including 50,400 in North America, with the bulk in India.

The new Mesa jobs will be full-time positions for highly skilled technology and business professionals in areas including process services and software application development and maintenance.

They’re part of a Cognizant goal to add roughly 25,000 U.S. workers over the next five years, Westphal said.

Cognizant didn’t disclose pay ranges for the Mesa jobs, but the company’s U.S. employees earned median or midpoint compensation of $90,300 last year, according to information in the company’s proxy report.

The company posted a profit of $456 million on revenue of $4 billion in its latest quarter, ended June 30.

Cognizant could be eligible for up to $9,000 per position under Arizona’s “quality jobs” tax credit, though the company hasn’t yet applied for that assistance, and up to $5,000 per trained employee in job-training grants.

The new 50,000square-foot Mesa facility is at 1130 N. Alma School Road.