THIS COMPANY PLANS TO ADD 300 JOBS IN GWINNETT

A $6 billion-a-year insurance company plans to hire about 300 workers in Gwinnett, part of the company’s efforts to bulk up its technical wing.

Assurant Inc., which currently has more than 2,000 employees in metro Atlanta, on Wednesday officially opened a tech support center in Duluth, a facility that will expand in the next few years from its current 35-person staffing, according to Michael McElroy, director of technical support operations for Assurant.

The New York-based company, which traces its corporate roots back to 1892, insures a range of devices and systems purchased by companies and consumers.

As an extension to the insurance, the company offers tech support, he said. “For any smart device in your home, any smart device in your car. Any smart device in your life, really. We provide the advice insurance and then you get access to our team.”

A customer buys the insurance along with the device, but it’s not unusual to run into problems making things work.

“All of these devices are starting to permeate our lives,” McElroy said. “They need to be configured, they need to be optimized. That’s where our team comes in. We want to help people to ... utilize and maximize their devices.”

The largest corporate employers in the county are Primerica, also an insurance company, and NCR, according to the economic development arm of the Gwinnett Chamber of Commerce.

The company’s main office in metro Atlanta is near SunTrust Park. The work done in Gwinnett is part of what the company calls its “Connected Living” business and is one of two places the work is done. The other is in Oregon.

“We chose this location (in Duluth) because of research about the technical pool of people in

the area,” McElroy said. “We 100 percent intend to recruit from this area, from Gwinnett County and metro Atlanta.”

The region’s growth has been steady for more than five years, although it has decelerated in recent months.

Gwinnett’s current unemployment rate is 3.3 percent, down from a peak of 9.6 percent coming out of the recession in 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

The county’s total labor force is about 500,000 people out of the 3.1 million in the metro region.

Most of the open positions are for technical support analysts. Among the other jobs being filled are positions as supervisors, trainers and process analysts, as well as in quality control.