Earlier this month, family, friends and co-workers gathered at the Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee to support 88 employees who had taken advantage of the company's education-assistance program.
This was the first group of Amazon workers in Minnesota to tap into the online retailer's $700 million push to "upskill" about a third of its U.S. workforce with on-site training and tuition reimbursement over the next six years.
Since rolling out the program in 2012, Amazon said more than 25,000 workers worldwide have received training in such fields as machine tooling, medical lab technologies, computer-aided design, nursing and aircraft mechanics.
The education-assistance program serves Amazon's interests to prepare entry-level workers for a workplace increasingly dominated by technology.
It is also a way to recruit and retain workers in a tight labor market, even if some employees will use their degrees as a steppingstone to a better-paying job outside of Amazon.
"We are becoming a link between education and employers," said Tammy Thieman, Amazon's Seattle-based senior manager for the Career Choice program. "We don't want to build a bridge to nowhere. We are very deliberate about making sure our education programs are relevant to the current marketplace."
While technology also creates jobs, a lack of workforce skills is a growing concern for the future health of the U.S. economy. About a quarter of the U.S. workforce is at high risk of losing jobs to automation, according to a Brookings Institution report.
The U.S. spends less than any other industrialized country on active labor-market policies that help train workers and match them to jobs, Brookings researchers pointed out. Meanwhile, employer-supported training, one of the main forms of skill development for workers, has been steadily declining.
