GE Careers Blog.

Santa Claus sat at the front of the classroom, and one by one the first-grade students at Washington Elementary School walked up to squeeze in for a picture. All around the classroom, students were happily chatting and working on craft projects. At each table sat volunteers from GE Capital, the General Electric subsidiary based in Billings, which adopted Washington Elementary three years ago. Sure enough, all 21 students in her class on Thursday had a dedicated employee from GE Capital sitting at their side helping them stitch together and decorate paperboard mittens and color little paper animals.

Seventy-nine percent of transportation CFOs expect to hire in the next 12 months, the “most bullish” of all industries, says GE Capital’s sixth market survey of chief financial officers of 500 U.S. middle-market companies.

The Business Journal has selected 28 winners for this year’s Healthiest Employers Awards, which recognize Milwaukee-area firms and organizations for improving the quality of life for their workers. The Healthiest Employers Awards are being presented in small, medium and large categories, based on total number of employees. GE Capital (Healthcare Financial Services – Equipment Finance) was named to the Medium Category.

Like its counterparts in the U.S. and the E.U., the Australian middle market of medium-sized businesses makes an outsized contribution to the economy, according to a GE Capital survey. In Australia, where GE Capital works with 7,500 medium-sized businesses (offering not just financing but a full suite of consulting services through GE Access), the middle market represents only 1.4% of businesses but provides one third of all business revenue and employs more than 3.2 million workers.

A new study by a group of European business schools and GE Capital found that companies from the so-called middle market based in four key EU countries – Germany, France, Italy and the U.K. – added a combined 200,000 jobs between 2007 and 2010, despite the great recession.