Amazon is the biggest online retailer in the United States. It is also ones of the nation’s largest employers. The company announced that roughly 100,000 of its employees are going to be retrained over the next five years. They will be taught new skills at a cost of around $700 million. There is a good reason for doing this. There is technology that is being developed that will change the way that many of these people do their jobs on a daily basis. Therefore, they will need to be trained so they understand how to use the new technology they are going to be encountering at their workplace.
The 100,000 employees accounts for nearly one-third of the people who work for Amazon. The company feels that it will be much cheaper to retrain their current employees instead of hiring new people and training them. The people who work for Amazon will have new work roles in the comping years. The company wants to make sure that they are equipped to handle these roles when they are needed down the road. All of the retraining at Amazon will be done on a voluntary basis. None of the people who receive training will need to keep working at Amazon after their classes are complete. Employees can receive training to work as a software engineer or in the IT support division that takes care of the machines at fulfillment centers.
The amount of money that Amazon will be spending to retrain its staff will turn out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $7,000 for each employee. This is a tremendous financial investment. However, it is one that Amazon feels will be worthwhile. It will give them a workforce that is capable of understanding and dealing with the latest technology that is available. These people can also use what they have learned to get a job at a company other than Amazon if they prefer.
One of the biggest reasons for Amazon investing this much money in retraining one-third of their workers is the fact that people with technical skills are in short supply. They have had a very hard time finding people to fill jobs that have technical aspects to them. They have more than 20,000 available positions right now. They are hoping to fill most of these positions from within by giving their current employees the skills they need. Only time will tell if this works.
Dil Bole Oberoi
