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.

Amazon’s slate of programs and opportunities meets changing needs of the workforce, and aims to attract and engage employees.

Amazon's Career Choice will pre-pay full college tuition at hundreds of education partners across the country. In addition to funding associate and bachelor’s degrees, the program will also fund high school completion, GED’s, and ESL proficiency certifications. Since launching in 2012, over 110,000 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.

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.

AWS Training and Certification is a dedicated business in AWS that equips organizations and learners of all skill levels, roles, and backgrounds with the knowledge and practical skills to innovate in the AWS Cloud. AWS Training and Certification offers more than 600 free digital trainings on AWS Skill Builder, our digital learning center. Amazon employees can also take advantage of AWS Skill Builder subscription content, instructor-led AWS classroom training, AWS Certification exam preparation resources, and experiential and game-based learning, at no cost.

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.

AWS Intelligence Initiative is a program that develops operational talent to gain the technical skills and security clearance needed to work in Amazon Dedicated Cloud (ADC) regions. The program allows participants to work on impactful technologies they are passionate about, while facilitating the expansion of ADC across the globe.