An image of a woman wearing an orange shirt and glasses. She is writing on a notepad with a laptop in front of her. Fast starts. All 750,000 U.S. hourly employees are eligible to participate in Career Choice 90 days after starting at Amazon. This makes all 400,000 employees who joined the company since the start of the pandemic eligible to access Amazon-funded education opportunities. "I worked in a warehouse setting for years but knew I wanted to help people and had been curious about healthcare. In just nine months, I became a certified clinical medical assistant while working at Amazon in Tracy, California, thanks to Career Choice," said former Amazon operations employee and Career Choice graduate Patricia Soto. "A career in healthcare would have been difficult to obtain without tuition support from Amazon and an internship opportunity to apply my new skills." Additional new skills training programs In 2020, Amazon announced Upskilling 2025, a $700 million commitment to train 100,000 U.S. employees by 2025 to help them transition into in-demand, higher-paying jobs. Since the launch of Upskilling 2025 in 2019, more than 70,000 employees have participated in one of Amazon's nine upskilling programs. With the additional investment and expanded education benefits for employees, the company is more than tripling its original pledge-with plans to invest $1.2 billion in these programs and provide free skills training to 300,000 employees by 2025. Amazon has seen a surge in applications to participate in education programs since the start of the pandemic, reflecting increased interest from employees to fortify their skillsets. Amazon Technical Academy, an upskilling program that helps Amazon employees from all backgrounds become software engineers in nine months, received thousands of applications, with interest increasing 798% over the past 12 months. To accommodate a surge in demand, Amazon scaled all of its upskilling programs, adapting to work-from-home schedules, and welcomed more participants by pivoting from in-person to virtual training. In addition to the new and expanded programs outlined above, Amazon employees have free access to the following skills training programs: Amazon Technical Academy A state-of-the-art training program curated and delivered by Amazon employees. It helps employees with a background in technology and coding gain graduate-level skills in machine learning and AI to solve customer problems. faux saint laurent bag