Employees, as well as their spouses or domestic partners, will be offered a series of live and Web-based investment seminars starting this month. Beginning in April, employees will be able to get unlimited one-on-one personal financial planning and counseling by phone through Fidelity Investments and The Ayco Co. LP, a division of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Financial planners from Fidelity and Ayco are trained in all of IBM’s benefits programs and will receive no additional pay or commissions for selling their companies’ products, IBM said.

“No other company that I’m aware of has ever done anything this comprehensive for its employees,” said Randy MacDonald, IBM Senior Vice President, Human Resources.

The move comes at a time when IBM and other companies are shifting retirement planning responsibility from the company to the employee. Traditional pensions, which promised an employee a guaranteed retirement income, are being replaced with “defined contribution” plans, in which employees put aside money for retirement, often with a partial match by employers.

IBM, for instance, closed its traditional pension to new hires starting in 2005 and said last year that employees hired earlier will have their benefits frozen after 2007.

To compensate, the computer maker doubled the matching contribution for recent hires in its company-sponsored retirement plan, and will do the same for all workers starting in 2008, paying dollar for dollar matches up to 6 percent of the salary a worker defers into the account.

IBM also added an unusual lump sum contribution of up to 4 percent of salary regardless of whether an employee defers any pay into the company-sponsored retirement plan. That means IBM’s share of a worker’s retirement savings could reach 10 percent of salary — more than three times the rate of many such plans.

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