Amazon Will Spend Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Retrain its Employees

Amazon.com Inc. is planning to spend a lot of money to retrain its employees.

The e-commerce giant has plans to spend $700 million in a corporate retraining initiative for its U.S. workers.

Amazon made the announcement on Thursday for a voluntary program aimed at retraining a third of its workforce
by 2025, which is around 100,000 workers.

The retraining program will allow fulfillment-center workers to retrain for higher-paying IT support roles, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Nontechnical workers can also be retrained as software engineers without going back to college, according to the report.

According to Jeff Wilke, chief executive of Amazon’s consumer business, who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, the initiative will help the company’s workers “be prepared for the opportunities of the future.”

“While many of our employees want to build their careers here, for others it might be a stepping stone to different aspirations,” stated Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president for H. “We think it’s important to invest in our employees, and to help them gain new skills and create more professional options for themselves.”

The retraining initiative could help Amazon fill out its HQ2 in Arlington, where it plans to base 25,000 employees by the mid-2030s.

Ardine Williams, the company’s vice president for workforce development at HQ2, stated, “Our consumer business, which is the web experience or that storefront experience — when logging into the website, looking at item detail pages, comparing items and eventually putting something into the basket — will have a presence in Arlington.”

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) have not been compensated for this article.