“Quality” like Amazon: Each employee is “given” $ 7,000 to learn new skills, not required to stay in Amazon

Because new technologies are making the work environment completely changed and increasingly difficult to recruit talents when the job market is in the hottest situation in recent decades with low unemployment. continually, American companies must pay more attention to retraining employees.

Amazon is a typical example. Yesterday, the world’s leading online retailer has announced plans to spend $ 700 million over the next six years to retrain 1/3 of the US workforce because of technologies such as automation or machine learning (machine learning) makes many workers change the way they work.

In recent years, a series of companies from AT&T, Walmart to JPMorgan Chase have tried to equip workers with new skills to be able to adapt to new roles. However, Amazon’s program is the largest ever, when the average per capita share, Amazon will spend about 7,000 USD per employee, equivalent to 1,200 USD per year from now until 2025. Put in correlation By comparison, statistics show that companies with 10,000 or more employees pay an average of $ 500 per worker to train them in 2017.

Amazon says the company will retrain 100,000 workers by expanding its existing training programs and adding new programs to help employees move to more complex jobs even at Amazon. or at a new company. This training program is voluntary and almost free, and does not require employees to stay in Amazon.

Workers in warehouses can receive additional training in technology, such as learning how to control operating machinery in the warehouse. For employees who are not exposed to technology, this is a really great opportunity when they are trained like software engineers for a few years without having to go back to university.

Amazon’s machine learning university will open thousands of software engineers with basic knowledge of computer science, allowing them to take courses in machine learning technology at graduate level. . Some of Amazon’s former employees were university professors who would stand in class.

The Amazon Career Choice program for warehouse employees – in which Amazon pays 95% of tuition – is expanded to include high-demand industries such as nurses and aircraft mechanics, fields In fact, Amazon has no need to recruit.

One challenge companies often face when retraining employees is to predict exactly what skills they need in the next few years. According to Jeff Wilke, a leader of Amazon, the company has recently been difficult to recruit skilled workers, while the demand for such workers is increasing.

Amazon now has more than 20,000 positions to recruit in the US, more than half of which are in Seattle headquarters. Recently the company has selected a suburb of Washington DC to open more headquarters, and predicts it will be the workplace of 25,000 people with an average annual income of $ 150,000.

In total Amazon has 630,000 employees (both part-time and full-time) around the world, as of the end of the first quarter. In the US alone there are about 275,000 full-time employees.

Many times have been criticized for working conditions, but Amazon said in recent years there have been many efforts to improve the working environment such as wage increases and giving employees more learning opportunities. Last year Amazon just raised the minimum wage for US employees to $ 15 per hour.