Our Upskilling Commitments

In September 2021, Amazon committed $1.2 billion to provide 300,000 employees with access to education and skills training programs—including college tuition for front-line employees—through 2025 as part of Amazon’s Upskilling 2025 pledge.

State-by-state survey responses from “The American Upskilling Study: Supporting and Empowering Workers,�? conducted by Gallup and commissioned by Amazon. The study explored how access to upskilling is becoming a sought-after employee benefit—and a powerful talent attraction tool for companies.

A joint survey from Gallup and Amazon found that employer-provided upskilling offers ways to solve recruitment challenges, increase productivity, and raise wages.

Career Choice is Amazon’s pre-paid tuition program for operations employees looking to further their education.
Amazon will pre-pay full college tuition at hundreds of education partners across the country. In addition to funding associate and bachelor’s degrees, Amazon’s Career Choice will also fund high school completion, GED’s, and ESL proficiency certifications. Since launching Career Choice in 2012, over 50,000 Amazon employees across 14 countries worldwide have received training for high-demand occupations including aircraft mechanics, computer-aided designers, commercial truck drivers, medical assistants, nurses and more.

Our tuition-free training and job-placement program that equips non-technical Amazon employees with the essential skills needed to transition into—and thrive in—technical careers at Amazon. Combining instructor-led, project-based learning with real-world applications, graduates master the most widely used software engineering skills and tools, including AWS cloud computing technology.

This initiative helps Amazon employees with a background in technology and coding gain skills in this discipline. As machine learning plays an increasingly important role in customer innovation, this program helps employees learn core skills to propel their career growth.

We’ve created programs that provide opportunities to get trained while at work, in high-demand areas like cloud computing. This is one way to support veterans as they break into careers, such as cloud support associate, data center technician, and software development engineer.

Designed for everyone from individuals looking for foundational cloud computing skills to seasoned IT professionals, we offer more than 500 free courses, interactive labs, virtual day-long training sessions, and numerous free instructor-led webinars, all in multiple languages. AWS Training and Certification also runs AWS Tech U, a 48-week residency program designed to help a select group of new AWS employees launch a successful cloud career.

This new upskilling program provides training in mechatronics and robotics for careers in robotics, with hourly wages up to nearly 40% higher for employees upon completion.

Surge2IT is a new, global Amazon upskilling program that provides tuition-free education and training for entry-level IT employees who want to advance their IT careers—at Amazon and beyond.

Amazon’s new upskilling program is helping employees learn UX research and design skills to better their own career and boost the experience of Amazon customers.

Amazon Web Services ‘Grow Our Own Talent’ program supports employees with nontraditional experience to gain on-the-job tech training and development.