Speaker 1: Good afternoon, everybody. It is still afternoon, right? Okay. Homestretch. Good afternoon. My name is Steve Johnson. I lead Amazon's Career Choice Program, and I want to thank the chamber for inviting us to talk and introduce you all to Amazon's Career Choice Program and talk about how at Amazon we think about approaching both the skills and both the talent skill and people's skill gaps that we've been talking about broadly for the day. So we'll go through what Career Choice is, how it operates, but then we'll also talk about some of the things we've learned at Amazon over the course of our time running the Career Choice Program, what's next at Career Choice, and then how you all can get involved and help with Career Choice overall. So Career Choice began in 2012 in the United States, and it's a program that is designed to upskill our hourly employees, and so it's specifically designated for hourly employees to increase their skill, to move into a job, whether it be at Amazon or somewhere else. Today, Career Skill operates across 13 countries around the world, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Costa Rica, South Africa, as well as others. We've had 21, more than 21,000 participants currently enrolled, and over 16,000 of them have been in the United States. So what is Career Choice and how does it work? Well, Career Choice prepays tuition, books, and fees up to 95% for an employee to return to school, to study in an in-demand field, up to a maximum of $12,000 over the course of a four-year period. As we've talked about earlier today, we seek to remove the single greatest barrier to education for our hourly employees, and that's the financial constraint, and so we prepay tuition up front. It's available to all of our hourly employees around the world, which includes the more than 200,000 hourly employees here in the United States. We focus on in-demand skills and careers so that we can present clear pathways to job opportunities for our associates, and our employees have no further obligation to Amazon after partaking in Career Skills in our Career Choice program. Once they graduate, and in fact, the jobs that we fund through Career Choice are not necessarily jobs related to Amazon. Some employees, when they come to work for Amazon, yes, it will be a long-term career, but for others, we recognize that Amazon will be just a career stop for them as they move on to other industries, and Career Choice is designed to facilitate that movement and empower our employees to choose where their passions lie and what their career intentions will be. So, overall, we focus on in-demand and well-paid career paths. We take this information through various data sources to narrow down to not only the broad fields of study and job areas that we focus on, but the careers within them, and so we have currently associates who study healthcare, information technology and computer science, electrical and mechanical skill trades, commercial driving, so it runs the gamut of many of the careers we've talked about here today that are in demand, and ultimately, what we're hoping to accomplish with Career Choice is the ability for employees to continue to move throughout their career journey and really look and follow their passion. And so, when we talk about what those in-demand careers are and how employees follow their passion, we at Amazon and why we do it becomes important, and why we do Career Choice is the second most frequent question I get asked. The first is, where is HQ2 going to be and when are we going to announce it? I don't know when that will be, but when we think about Career Choice, we believe at Amazon that if we hire great customer-obsessed talent and we provide them an opportunity to explore other career opportunities, remove financial barriers to education and allow them to go back to school, and prevent them with career transition and assistance and clear views into another career, that every day they come to Amazon and focus on customers, it improves our overall customer obsession and improves our customer experience. And at Amazon, when we think about customer obsession and increasing selection, as many people have talked about receiving orders from Amazon and the like, we view that same customer obsession for our associates in Career Choice. We want to expand the selection of career opportunities that our employees have, regardless of whether they directly serve Amazon in a career path. We've talked a lot today about nontraditional learners, working adult learners, and barriers that they face. And we, our employees, also face barriers in addition to financial when it comes to returning to school. So Career Choice is more than just a tuition prepayment program. We've actually continued to improve the program and enhance it based on real-life barriers that our employees face to facilitate their successful completion of the program. A couple of highlights of things we've done. One is we've built on-site classrooms. We build classrooms directly into our large fulfillment centers. They're equipped with anything any other classroom would have, including computers, internet access, sinks for lab work, et cetera. And they're built with glass walls, fishbowl style. So other employees, in high-traffic areas of the building, so other employees, as they pass by, can be inspired to participate in Career Choice as well. But most importantly, we build classrooms into our fulfillment centers because we bring schools and education directly to our associates. We eliminate the burden of them having to leave work and commute back and forth to school. Second, we know that and have learned that out next to the financial burden and next to the financial barrier, that time and other commitments is the second most important barrier that we need to solve for our associates in being able to return to school and work at the same time. So we've developed, we include school accommodations throughout our network. Employees have the opportunity to change their work schedule to fit their education schedule, so that way they can meet their work and school commitments and have the flexibility to be successful completers in school. And thirdly, we offer job readiness support. So as our employees begin to reach graduation status and begin to get ready to leave the program, we have job readiness skills training programs to help them move into not only the career transition, but prepare them for either going to school or transitioning to a career. So we offer computer skills programs, like we've talked about today. We offer language programs throughout, of either native language or English, depending on the country where we operate, to help serve our immigrant employee population. We also offer interview prep and resume writing skills, all of which work to help our employees be successful in their, in preparation for the next stage of their career. With that, I'd like to show you a little bit of one of our success stories.

Speaker 2: Good morning, everyone. Welcome, welcome, welcome. My mom, she had two heart attacks within less than six months apart. Life is interesting. I never expected for my life to go this way. Use the heel of your hand to only focus on that. One, two, three. Once I got out of high school, I couldn't afford college. It was extremely frustrating. That's why I worked a lot. I loved every bit of working for Amazon. I did everything I can to stand out. I was like, wow, like, for real? I can go to school and they'll pay for me to go to school. I took advantage of it. I couldn't help but take advantage of it. They have a program called Career Choice. Basically, Amazon will pay up to 95% of your tuition. They actually have classes in the fulfillment center. My career is on a new, different path. I went from my job at Amazon to now I'm one-on-one with students. Yeah, because you want to keep that pressure in that area. I work for American Red Cross. I teach first aid, CPR. My motivation for the healthcare field, it was personal because of my mom. Oh, I'm so proud of her. Oh, my God. Don't cry, Mom. Don't cry. Don't cry, Mom. If it wasn't for Career Choice and me taking my path with Amazon, I probably wouldn't be able to get here. So that's Jamie.

Speaker 1: Jamie worked in one of our California fulfillment centers when she took Career Choice. And through Career Choice was able to, as she mentioned, follow her passion and move into a job in healthcare with the American Red Cross, who's one of our employer partners that hires Career Choice graduates through the healthcare field. So when we talk, when we think about what we're trying to build, we're trying to build that talent pipeline on a sustainable, repeatable basis that we've talked about for most of today. And so we have, we look to partner with employers and schools to bring them together to make sure that we are starting with our successful employees, and then we're going to bring them together to make sure that we are successful employees working backwards from our customer, connecting with employers to understand what are their critical needs from a talent perspective, what are the skills and credentials they require, and then bringing education in to make sure that our associates are being taught the skills and credentials that employers are going to hire from for the talent needs they have within the local communities where we operate. So this is where you all can become important stakeholders to our success in Career Choice. If you're an employer and you have critical hiring needs in an in-demand job, we want to partner with you to be able to create that talent pipeline to allow our employees the option to choose that career path. So Delta Airlines, airline pilots, airline mechanics are all included as eligible under Career Choice. Mercedes Benz, diesel mechanics, truck mechanics, auto mechanics, robotics technicians are all eligible under Career Choice. Advanced manufacturing, aerospace manufacturing. I know Tom earlier talked about commercial driving. Commercial driving is actually one of the most popular programs we have in Career Choice. We actually graduate several thousand commercial drivers a year from our program. And then seek to place them with employers in the local community. As an educational institution, if you're an educational institution and you're seeking and you're creative in trying to solve the specific barriers and challenges of working adult students, and their ability to successfully complete education and compete in today's economy, we want to partner with you to be able to bring education to our associates in a way that they will be able to successfully complete and transition into their career path. We don't measure success in Career Choice through traditional retention and attraction metrics. I'm sure there's an impact on Amazon's retention and attraction that can be attributed to Career Choice. We don't act. We don't just We don't measure it. How we measure success in Career Choice and how we measure Career Choice and success at Amazon is by how many employees can successfully graduate their education that they've chosen, the educational path that they've chosen, and then transition into a job in the skills that they have sought. And again, regardless of whether that is a job that's in Amazon or external to Amazon. Either way, it's success as far as we're concerned. Today's conferences have been about talent forward. We think Career Choice is one of the ways in which Amazon is trying to think about talent more broadly in the communities where we serve to be able to, while we might be a large employer of entry-level workers in those communities, how we upskill them on an ongoing, sustainable basis and have them move back into the local economy at higher skilled roles. So if you're somebody that would like to partner with us in Career Choice, either as an employer or as an educator, you're welcome to contact me directly or see me or some folks from my team that are here at the networking reception. Thank you.