Amazon recently announced that it will spend more than $700 million to train 100,000 employees for higher-skilled jobs – or “upskilling” – over the next six years, NPR reports.
The announcement comes as Amazon joins other tech giants in investing and retaining its employees, and as automation creeps into the job marketplace.
The training programs will be offered to employees of all skill levels; employees will be able to select programs that will train them for other jobs within Amazon, or opt for certificate programs that could potentially be used outside of the company, NPR says. Some of Amazon’s multi-million dollar investment will pay for employees to attend its Machine Learning University, learn software development in its Technical Academy, take on apprenticeships, or get Amazon Web Services cloud certification at a discount. It will also go towards the company’s recently risen minimum wage (which was bumped to $15 per hour), health insurance, 401K benefits, and parental leave.
After analyzing its hiring data from its U.S. Workforce, Amazon found that its fastest growing highly skilled jobs over the past five years includes:
- data mapping specialist (832 percent growth)
- data scientist (505 percent)
- solutions architect (454 percent)
- security engineer (229 percent)
- business analyst (160 percent)
“Within customer fulfillment, highly skilled roles have increased over 400 percent, including jobs like logistics coordinator, process improvement manager and transportation specialist within our customer fulfillment network,” Amazon said.
The company expects that its workforce will boom to 300,000 employees by the end of the year. Amazon also hopes to create positions for people whose jobs might be affected by robots and other AI; these positions will be crafted around maintaining and developing automation solutions. As a result, Amazon employees will likely not have won’t have to worry about losing their position entirely, but rather experience benefits from the company’s “upskill” plan.
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