Des décennies d'expérience dans la préparation aux concours d'anglais.

Starting in January, Amazon for the first time will pay for tuition, fees and books for warehouse, transportation and other hourly employees who want to pursue bachelor's degrees. It will also begin covering high school diploma programs, *GEDs and English as a Second Language certifications for employees.

Amazon employees who have been with the company for at least 90 days are able to use the benefit, and employees must continue working part-time or full-time at Amazon while taking classes. Workers at Whole Foods, which Amazon owns, are not eligible. Its move to add four-year degrees to its package comes as rival employers such as Walmart and Target beef up their college benefit programs for workers.

Walmart said in July that it was dropping a previous $1 a day tuition fee paid by its workers who want to earn a degree at 10 academic partners and also begin covering the costs of their books. Walmart has around 1.5 million workers.

Target also said it will pay for full tuition and books for more than 340,000 workers at around 40 partner schools. Target also said it will pay up to $10,000 a year for master's programs within its network of partners.

Amazon's move also comes as retailers and warehouses around the country face challenges hiring employees to staff stores and warehouses. In July, there were 879,000 unfilled jobs in the retail industry and 222,000 in the transportation and warehouse industry, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Amazon said in May that it was hiring 75,000 workers across its logistics network and bumping starting pay from its $15 minimum rate to an average of $17 an hour. The company is also offering sign-up bonuses of up to $1,000 for seasonal and warehouse workers, spending a total of more incentives," said Brian Olsavsky, Amazon's chief financial officer, in July. "It's a very competitive labor market out there. And certainly, the biggest contributor to inflationary pressures that we're seeing in the business."

Amazon also announced Thursday that it plans to retrain 300,000 employees for higher-skilled, fast-growing jobs within the company over the next four years, upping a prior pledge it made in 2019 to retrain 100,000 workers for new positions. Amazon offers internal training programs for roles such as software and IT engineers, data center technicians, and researchers and designers.

*GED = General Educational Development

Adapted from cnn.com September 9, 2021.