Amazon today announced that it’s going to spend $700 million in order to retrain a third of its employees in the United States for in-demand jobs. The amount will be used to provide upskilling training programs for one in three of the company’s employees in the United States by 2025. It will help them move to more in-demand jobs within the company.
Amazon’s workforce is expected to hit 300,000 in the United States this year with the company employing some 600,000+ people across the globe. The pledge to retrain a third of its entire U.S. workforce will certainly be one of the largest corporate retraining programs in history.
Amazon has reviewed its workforce and analyzed its U.S. hiring to figure out that its fastest-growing highly skilled jobs over the last five years include data mapping specialist, data scientist, solutions architect and business analyst in addition to logistics coordinator, process improvement manager and transportation specialist within its customer fulfillment network.
So it pledges to upskill 100,000 of employees in its tech hubs, corporate offices, fulfillment centers, retail stores, and transportation network. They will be given access to training programs that will help them move into more highly skilled roles either within Amazon or outside the company.
Programs like the Amazon Technical Academy will give non-technical employees the skills to transition into software engineering while Associate2Tech will train fulfillment center workers for technical roles regardless of previous IT experience.