The skill improvement plan of Amazon Institute of Technology is aimed at Amazon employees who are interested in becoming software engineers. Its leaders said that education is the key to long-term success.
These benefits are huge for Amazon employees who have been admitted by Amazon Technical College. This is one of the nine training programs that Amazon has committed to equip more than 300000 Amazon employees with new professional skills by 2025 with 1.2 billion dollars.
Amazon Technical Academy trains employees to master the basic skills required to transition to the role of entry-level software developer engineer at Amazon. This program does not require the applicant's previous computer training, but only a high school diploma or GED, as well as perseverance through the strict nine month full-time course created by an expert Amazon software engineer.
Since its launch in 2017, hundreds of Amazon employees have registered with the Amazon Institute of Technology. Amazon Institute of Technology has made more than 90% of its graduates work as software development engineers within Amazon, and their salaries and wages have increased by 93% on average.
As part of its commitment to providing career development opportunities for its employees, the company has invested more than $12 million in the program in 2020 alone.
College graduates come from various professional backgrounds of Amazon, including employees of the operation center, project managers, recruitment coordinators, administrative assistants and financial analysts.
Software Engineering for Everyone
Since its establishment, the goal of Amazon Institute of Technology is not only to help individuals advance their careers to better feed themselves and their families, but also to provide Amazon hiring managers with high-performance software engineers who understand Amazon's system and culture.
In the past four years, the team has worked tirelessly to establish the correct curriculum. They conducted extensive focus group discussions with software development managers and software engineers from across the company to identify all the skills that software engineers need for daily use in their work and throughout their career.
Photographer: Mitch Pittman/Amazon
"We break down complex software engineering topics into small, cautious skills," Rajagopal said.
Through the skill catalog, Amazon Institute of Technology tries to re conceive how to teach these skills, so that the broad audience can obtain these skills more easily. The structure of the learning environment is a flipped classroom environment in which students read and watch lecture materials before class. This gives them the opportunity to spend as much time as possible studying the material, and then work with other students and teachers on in-depth topics in the classroom.
Lecture materials and assignments use real-world examples that are widely understood outside the rigid software engineering culture to teach skills. "When we delve into a specific topic, we will not teach abstract mathematical concepts that are often used in the traditional computer science university environment," Rajagopal said. "On the contrary, we associate this concept with real life examples, such as cleaning rooms, planting flowers, or opening a Russian doll that many people are familiar with.