Should Amazon Upskill its Employees?

Retention, improvement and modeling HR asset.

Will Amazon’s Plan to ‘Upskill’ Its Employees Pay Off?

Wharton’s Matthew Bidwell and NYU’s Ari Ginsberg discuss Amazon’s $700 million plan to retrain its workforce.

Prime Day was a big success for Amazon this year: The two-day online shopping event held in mid-July and featuring special discounts netted higher sales than last year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, the company said on July 17.  But that wasn’t the only positive publicity Amazon received this month: On July 11, the company announced it is launching an ambitious $700 million retraining program to create “pathways to careers” for its employees in areas including health care, machine learning, manufacturing, robotics, computer science and cloud computing.

The six-year, $700 million effort covers about 100,000 employees, or about a third of Amazon’s U.S. workforce of nearly 300,000, and works out to about $1,200 a year annually for each employee. (That contrasts with a $500 spend on each employee for training by large employers with 10,000 workers or more that were surveyed by the Association for Talent Development, The Wall Street Journal reported.) The mostly free program does not require employees to stay on at Amazon; some programs pay 95% of the costs for tuition and textbooks, capped at $12,000 per employee over four years.

The move will make it easier for Amazon to hire and retain employees, gain a competitive edge over rivals, and it could help to improve its image, said experts at Wharton and New York University. ...