The world is heading to the new age of technology and automation. Companies must also adapt to the new rise of technology for sure. Well, Amazon is certainly on the right track.
Amazon announced that it will spend $700 million over the next six years to retrain 100,000 of it’s US workforce. And that’s huge for everyone. — It means that the workforce will be able to adapt to such great changes in technology.
That’s pretty cool, right?
Well, Amazon called it Upskilling 2025.
The main idea from the program is to make Amazon workers develop and progress into more complicated or advanced jobs inside or even outside Amazon. Not only that, the training will be not forced to the employees but it will be voluntary to them.
There are a lot of non-technical warehouse workers in different centers who might show interests in IT, Software, Development, Echo, AWS, and so on. — These people will be trained in such fields and they will be more qualified in the future to switch careers. — And I think that’s amazing.
“While many of our employees want to build their careers here, for others it might be a stepping stone to different aspirations. We think it’s important to invest in our employees, and to help them gain new skills and create more professional options for themselves.” (Beth Galetti), Amazon’s head of HR.
Now, if you think about it, these people wouldn’t be able to switch careers without this program in the future. And Upskilling 2025 could also help attract more employees because of future opportunities they might not have been previously qualified for.
“Through its Upskilling 2025 pledge, Amazon is focused on creating pathways to careers in areas that will continue growing in years to come, including healthcare, machine learning, manufacturing, robotics, computer science, cloud computing, and more,” the company said in a statement.
Another training initiative, Amazon Apprenticeship, offers paid accelerated classroom training and on-the-job apprenticeships within Amazon. The training program will help employees operate in technology.
In a world where AI and Machine Learning are developing and more capable of doing outstanding things, I think the Amazon Apprenticeship training program will make a huge impact on employees.
Machines are expected to displace about 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world over the next decade.
On the other hand, Amazon is dealing with rising internal issues from some fulfillment workers.
Lately, Amazon’s plan was to spend $800 million to speed up deliveries for Prime members initiated tension between the company and the leader of a major workers’ union.
The new initiative could hurt the workers and they might be struggling to keep up with the demand.