Bolstered by gains in military contracts and other programs, Harris Corp. plans to increase its Brevard County staff by at least 300 people by mid-2008.
During that time, Harris expects to hire a total of 400 people for its Brevard County operations. At least 300 -- or 75 percent -- will be new jobs, and the rest will be filling positions left vacant by retirements and attrition, Harris spokesman Jim Burke said Wednesday.
Many of the new jobs will be engineering positions -- typically with starting salaries for college graduates at more than $50,000 a year, Burke said.
"The majority of the jobs will be engineering-oriented and other technical jobs," Burke said.
Melbourne-based Harris, a communications equipment and information technology company, employs about 7,000 people in the Melbourne and Palm Bay area, making it Brevard's largest private employer at a time when some other employers are cutting jobs or freezing hiring because of the slowing economy.
The company's hiring plans for this year follow its hiring of between 600 and 700 people in Brevard last year, mainly to fill new jobs, Burke said.
In addition to hiring in Brevard, Harris plans to increase staffing this year elsewhere, including those in the Rochester, N.Y., and Washington, D.C., areas.
Harris has more than 16,000 employees companywide. In August, the company reported record annual sales of $4.24 billion for fiscal 2007 ended June 29.
Last week, the company raised its outlook for fiscal 2008, projecting sales between $5.2 billion and $5.3 billion. Fiscal 2008 will end in late June.
The company's financial performance has been lifted by a number of wartime defense contracts for tactical radios and other systems being used in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
In addition, Harris benefits from large non-military federal contracts, such as those to produce a modernized communications system for the Federal Aviation Administration and handheld computers for the Census Bureau.
Harris also has grown in size from corporate acquisitions, such as last summer's $400 million purchase of Multimax Inc., a Herndon, Va.-based provider of information technology services. That acquisition increased Harris payrolls by more than 1,000 people employed by Multimax.
Meanwhile, Harris has been pushing deeper into commercial broadcasting markets, developing equipment for mobile television broadcasting, as well as various news media broadcasting and editing systems.
Harris recently expanded in Palm Bay, leasing space at a former Intersil Corp. building, Burke said. Intersil, with facilities along Palm Bay Road, was Harris' semiconductor division before it was sold in 1999, and it has maintained many of those jobs. Before the sale, Harris employed about 7,400 people locally.
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