Amazon to fund university fees for frontline US staff
Amazon is expanding the range of education and skills training benefits it offers to frontline US employees by investing $1.2 billion by 2025 in funding their full college tuition.
This will also cover high school diplomas, GEDs and English as a Second Language proficiency certifications and will include the cost of classes, books and fees..
Part of the Amazon’s Career Choice programme, the scheme will be open to staff members who have worked at the company for at least three months.
Dave Clark, Amazon chief executive of worldwide consumer, said: “Amazon is now the largest job creator in the US and we know that investing in free skills training for our teams can have a huge impact for hundreds of thousands of families across the country. We launched Career Choice almost 10 years ago to help remove the biggest barriers to continuing education—time and money—and we are now expanding it even further to pay full tuition and add several new fields of study.”
Amazon is also adding three new education programmes to provide employees with the opportunity to learn skills within the fields of data centre maintenance and technology, IT, user experience and research design.
Clark added: “This new investment builds on years of experience supporting employees in growing their careers, including some unique initiatives like building more than 110 on-site classrooms for our employees in Amazon fulfilment centres across 37 states. Today, over 50,000 Amazon employees around the world have already participated in Career Choice and we’ve seen first-hand how it can transform their lives.”
