Amazon's $2.5B skills fund turns one, with $1B aimed at Career Choice

Amazon's $2.5 billion skills gamble is one year old, and the company is already carving out the biggest slice. In a Wednesday update, Amazon said $1 billion of the Future Ready 2030 fund is now committed to Career Choice, its prepaid education program for employees. The program pushed into Japan and Mexico this year, taking it to 16 countries total.

The scale is hefty: more than 500,000 employees worldwide have gone through Career Choice since it started in 2012, Amazon said. In the U.S., every hourly employee can sign up, along with salaried staff at Level 4 and above. Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people experience and technology, laid out the progress in a blog post.

Amazon isn't new to this game. Its 2019 upskilling pledge aimed to get new skills to 100,000 employees by 2025 — and it blew past that, reaching more than 700,000 workers globally, including 425,000 in the U.S. and 275,000 elsewhere. That's seven times the original target. Galetti said the result convinced the company to think bigger.

So in October 2025 came Future Ready 2030: $2.5 billion aimed at getting at least 50 million people ready for a shifting labor market, spanning Amazon staff, students and career changers. Alongside the cash, Amazon has added credential programs for fields like manufacturing and chip engineering, plus pathways tied to drone delivery, and expanded tools including AWS Skill Builder and Machine Learning University.