President Barack Obama on Thursday laid out plans to help U.S. businesses double their export sales and add what he said would be 2 million more jobs at home during the next 5 years.

“In a time when millions of Americans are out of work, boosting our exports is a short-term imperative,” Obama said in unveiling his National Export Initiative.

“When other markets are growing and other nations are competing, we’ve got to get even better,” he told the annual conference of the Export-Import Bank. “We need to secure our companies a level playing field. We need to guarantee American workers a fair shake. In other words, we need to up our game.”

Obama’s plan would boost government efforts to help U.S. businesses, create new partnerships with shipping firms such as FedEx, and ease controls over the export of technology such as cell phones, which currently have to go through lengthy reviews to ensure that they don’t compromise national security secrets.