Amazon To Invest $700 Million To Retain And Train Employees!

E-commerce giant Amazon is making headlines again. The company recently announced that it would invest $700 million towards the retraining of almost 100,000 of its employees in the United States by 2025, in a program known as Upskilling 2025. 

This is a major step taken by the e-commerce behemoth after being in hot waters due to the alleged lethargic working conditions in some of its warehouses. It was noted that employees’ working in Amazon’s warehouses are overworked to reach the targets set by the company. It has also come to notice that workers in Amazon’s Shakopee, Minnesota warehouse have planned to go on strike. This strike, if gone ahead with, will directly coincide with the annual Prime Day Sale of Amazon. 

The move is considered as one of the latest attempts made by Amazon to prove that the workers are being taken care of. In 2018, the company increased the minimum wage rate in the US to $15 an hour. According to studies conducted by Amazon, the fastest-growing jobs were that of data scientists, solutions architects, data mapping specialists and business analysts.

The retraining programs will also help to boost employees’ morale and encourage them to remain in the company. 

How will the employees get benefitted?

This would help these workers to be able to enhance and develop their skills, and help them to flourish within the economy. This means that the company will be spending almost $7,000 on every employee, which is on third of Amazon’s workforce in the US itself. According to the company, employees in corporate offices, stores, tech hubs as well as in the transportation network of Amazon will be a part of this training. 

What will the program include?

The Amazon employees having technical backgrounds will additionally also gain skills in machine learning under the Machine Learning University initiative for onsite training. Under the Amazon Technical Academy, non-technical employees will get to increase skills in software engineering. 

The Associate2Tech initiative will be used to train employees of fulfilment centres to advance into more technical roles, while Amazon Career Choice will be a pre-paid tuition initiative under which fulfilment centre employees will be trained to move to occupations with high demand. 

Additionally, Amazon Apprenticeship will offer a paid classroom training and apprenticeships with Amazon, while AWS Training and Certification will help employees to gain practical skills in AWS Cloud. 

This Amazon has decided to invest in employees at a time when technology has been impacting everything. As an increasing number of the processes at the company’s warehouses are becoming automatic, robots are expected to take over a majority share of the jobs. Therefore, Amazon seems to have made a head-start into filling new job roles.