Amazon wants to train the very people it is no longer able to recruit. On Thursday, the US company announced a global investment of $1bn in its Career Choice programme, designed to enable its employees to acquire new skills in fields considered strategic for the economy of the future.
The programme, launched in 2012, funds training even when it results in employees leaving the company. More than 300,000 employees worldwide have already taken part. Amazon now aims to increase this figure to 800,000, with 500,000 new beneficiaries by 2030.
Europe is a key focus of this strategy. Amazon plans to invest over €30m in Career Choice across the continent from 2026 onwards. The company is working with more than 90 European training institutions to offer courses that fit in with the flexible working hours at its logistics centres.
The training programmes will be refocused on sectors considered to be particularly promising, including cybersecurity, software development, logistics, renewable energy and mechatronics.
Part of a $2.5bn programme
“We couldn’t find enough qualified people for the roles we need to fill. So we made a decision: we’re going to train them ourselves,” said John Boumphrey, Amazon’s UK director, at the ‘Delivering the Future’ event held in Dartford, near London.
Amazon illustrates this trend through internal career paths linked to the increasing automation of its infrastructure. At the logistics centre in Tilbury, UK, an employee who was originally hired as a order picker is now undergoing training in mechatronics to maintain the site’s robotic systems.
This initiative is part of the ‘Future Ready 2030’ programme, which has a global budget of $2.5bn and aims to train 50 million people in skills relevant to the future of work.
The highest level of investment in Europe
At the same time, Amazon is also seeking to demonstrate its economic clout in Europe. The company claims to have invested more than €60bn on the continent by 2025, including over €40bn in the European Union. This would represent its highest annual level of investment in Europe.
Amazon estimates that it currently supports more than 1.5 million jobs in Europe, including its direct employees, temporary workers, indirect jobs in construction and logistics, as well as business generated by SMEs using its platform.
The group is placing particular emphasis on Spain, where it has just announced a €33.7bn investment in its data centre infrastructure to support the needs of artificial intelligence in Europe.
Amazon is also continuing the European roll-out of Alexa+, its new generation of voice assistant based on generative AI, which is now available in several European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
Through these announcements, the US group is seeking to bolster its image as a long-term industrial and technological player on the European continent, at a time when debates on digital sovereignty, competitiveness and the effects of automation are gaining momentum in Europe.
