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Amazon said Thursday that more than 750,000 of its U.S.-based operating employees would be eligible to receive at least funding to cover tuition, but only at the internet giant’s partner schools.
The tuition initiative is an extension of the company’s Career Choice program, which supports the education and training of workers, often at Amazon facilities.
“Amazon is now the biggest job creator in the United States, and we know that investing in free training for our teams can have a huge impact on hundreds of thousands of families across the country,” said Dave Clark, CEO of Worldwide Consumer at Amazon. “We launched Career Choice almost a decade ago to help remove the biggest barriers to continuing education – time and money – and we’re expanding it even further to pay full tuition and add several new fields of study. “
Asked to provide a list of the “hundreds of education partners across the country” where Amazon will pay for tuition, a spokesperson said The register a full list is being prepared and more information will be available in January.
The electronic gift shop, IT services, grocery store and logistics have spelled out the deal in more specific terms on their website: From 1 year to 90 days, annual budgets will increase to $ 5,250 with no lifetime maximum, and Amazon will cover up to 100% of qualifying expenses. “
Thus, Amazon does not foot the bill for an education of more than $ 50,000 per year at the Ivy League. This helps people to attend, for example, Alamo Colleges, a network of community colleges in Texas.
There is more fine print here in the form of an FAQ, which states that employees “can continue to register for courses as long as they are employed at Amazon.” Workers can spend “as much or as little time completing their education as their schedule and annual budget allows.” Tuition fees will be prepaid up to the annual maximum, which may include books and fees.
“Career Choice is available to all full-time and part-time blue badge employees,” the FAQ continues. “This includes all non-exempt FC, CS, corporate, AWS, Amazon Fresh Stores, Amazon Books, 4 Star Amazon, Amazon Pop Up, Amazon Go, and select qualifying retailers and affiliates.”
While it doesn’t exactly offer a blank check, Amazon is improving the benefits and training opportunities for its employees, some of whom have taken the opportunity to look to other careers outside of Amazon. The mega-company cited Career Choice graduate and former Amazon operations worker Patricia Soto, who trained for nine months to become a certified clinical medical assistant while working at Amazon in Tracy, California.
In addition, Amazon is launching three new training or “upgrading” programs that are free to Career Choice participants. These include: AWS Grow Our Own Talent, a training and placement service for the company’s cloud services group; Surge2IT, self-paced learning resources for novice IT professionals; and User Experience Design and Research (UXDR), a one-year program aimed at helping employees develop their user experience and design skills.
In 2019, Amazon launched its Upskilling 2025 initiative, with a commitment of $ 700 million to train 100,000 U.S. employees by 2025. The company said 70,000 employees had since participated in its nine training programs. Its Career Choice expansion revises that investment to $ 1.2 billion until 2025, we are told.
Amazon Technical Academy, one of the company’s education options, is a nine-month in-house training program that placed 98% of graduates in in-house software engineer roles that improved compensation for 93 employees. % on average, depending on the company.
This is on the high end of salary improvements for training, however. Amazon has partnered with survey firm Gallup to study the monetary benefits of skill development programs. The company funding study found that workers increased their wages by an average of 8.6 percent, or about $ 8,000 more per year, by taking such courses.
Under-offer and on-demand
These programs come at a time that has been characterized in turn as a labor shortage or a shortage of wages and workers’ rights.
Curtis Duba, senior economist in the Economic Policy Division of the United States Chamber of Commerce, a leading business lobby group, on Wednesday sounded the alarm bells about the intensifying labor shortage.
“The biggest problem facing our economy right now is getting workers to fill the historically high number of open jobs,” Duba said in an online article. “Workers remain on the sidelines due to overly generous government allowances (now mostly expired), fears about the virus, lack of child care and other factors.”
Duba argues that Congress and the White House must do more to focus on “taking people off the sidelines and putting them back to work”, without asking the companies represented by his organization to reward workers enough to motivate a return. in the labor pool.
That’s what Amazon seems to be trying to do, if you ignore the company’s controversial anti-union relationship with its workforce. Additionally, Walmart and Target revised their education benefits this year, which may have encouraged Amazon to follow suit.
“This new initiative appears to be a strategy for them to recruit and retain workers during a time when labor supply is scarce,” said Audrey Guo, assistant professor of economics at the University of Santa Clara, in an email to The register. “Considering the high turnover rate at a company like Amazon, this type of advantage could also potentially attract more serious / better workers than just an hourly wage increase.” ®
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