Ardine Williams

Vice President, Workforce Development

Ardine Williams joined Amazon in 2014. She is currently the vice president of workforce development for HQ2, the future corporate headquarters in Virginia.

Following are excerpts of an interview with Ardine Williams conducted by James Jacoby on December 16, 2019.

This interview appears in:

Amazon Empire

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Developing a Pipeline of Tech Workers

So let’s start with what your job is.

So I work on Workforce Development, and that’s sort of a nebulous, vague title, but what it means is I’m thinking about the pipeline of talent for Amazon, and that’s about making sure that we have, internally, folks have the skills that they need to engage in that career lattice, to move from one job to another; that as we’re thinking about and engaging with colleges, both two-year and four-year, so higher ed, that we’re helping to signal the kinds of changes in technology and soft skills that we want our new hires to have.And then backing up even further—I mean, one of the cool things about Amazon is we like to really work backward from a problem—is thinking about that pipeline from K to 12, so even elementary and high school, and thinking about what are the capabilities there that we need to think about so that students are exposed to STEM, that they’re comfortable engaging with it so that when they get to high school and college, they’re more likely to engage with that as an education option.

So how does it work in terms of—in terms of who are you speaking to?How are you trying to develop this pipeline of a new workforce for Amazon?

So I have the luxury of talking to a lot of different people.So right now, for example, with HQ2 in Virginia, I’m visiting—I’m in the process of visiting the 95 counties in the commonwealth, and so I talk to a wide variety of people, from higher ed, so two- and four-year colleges, to superintendents and principals at high schools to city councils to local officials, chambers of commerce, teachers in classrooms, other businesses, because that gives me the opportunity to learn more about what the environment is, what’s happening on the ground, what’s going really, really well and where there’s opportunity to do things that would have an impact.

And when you say opportunity to have an impact or to kind of influence the direction of things, what do you mean?What does that mean?

So if you take a step back and think about the—I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there’s 1.4 million, or there will be next year, 1.4 million STEM jobs open and only 400,000 candidates available that have the skills.That’s a supply chain issue.And so if you take a step back and say, “What do we need to do to address that?,” we can continue to scrap and fight over the same small number of people, but what do we need to do to address that supply issue?And part of it is creating the opportunity for students as young as elementary school to be exposed to technology in a way that makes it accessible and interesting.

And so there are schools that are doing really great things, and there are others that, for example, don’t have teachers who are certified to teach in computer science.And so it’s understanding what it might take at that either the local district level, the county level or at the state level so that when we advocate, we’re advocating for programs that make sense.

… Earlier you’d mentioned—you said that there’s a supply chain problem to some degree.What does that mean for Amazon in terms of tech talent and a supply chain problem?

So we have—we employ about 750,000 people around the world, and at our larger sites like Seattle, about half of our population are tech.And back to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data—1.4 million jobs; 400,000 people with the qualifications to fill those jobs—it means that we are working to recruit from a limited pool of qualified people.And in a time of unprecedented unemployment, it just exacerbates the problem.

So tell me a bit about what precipitated the announcement of the upskilling initiatives, the $700 million initiative that was announced.

So we’ve been doing upskilling for a while.It was an opportunity for us, I think, to put them together and really—

Do you mean Career Choice?

So Career Choice, the Machine Learning University, Amazon Technical Academy.Many of the programs that are included in that have been running for a while.Our DOL [Department of Labor]-registered apprenticeship programs kicked off in 2017.So it was an acknowledgement that, in Amazon fashion, that the programs are working.We had experimented, piloted and then really doubled down, and this was an opportunity to take a step back and say: “You know what?We are one of the largest employers in the United States, and we have an obligation to create good jobs.”And good jobs comprise three things: a good wage—we have a $15-an-hour minimum wage that we announced and implemented last November; robust benefits from day one, including parental leave, which when you look at the data, the BLS says 13% of Americans have parental leave, and so making that available to workers is incredibly important; and then the third piece is a career, and really what’s necessary for a career is the ability to take experience and then add training to it, because now, you know, you start out in one place.I may begin as a receptionist, and then I move into a recruiting coordinator role because I’m leveraging that customer service piece.And then that recruiting coordinator role, I’m learning some project management because I’m involved in recruiting events.So now I move on to the next—I take a little bit of training, and I move on to a role as a project coordinator.So I’ve got this career ladder moving, because I’m taking experience and adding kind of training as I go along.And so by providing that training and adding it to the work experience, we provide a career ladder.

Now, a large number of our employees—400,000 in the U.S.—work across our fulfillment center network, and in many cases, there aren’t the career opportunities within the company for those folks.And so by providing something like Career Choice, we create a career path for people, whether it’s inside the company or outside.And that creates good jobs.

Work in the Fulfillment Centers

… Well, yeah, I’m curious about what the thinking is like internally about, for instance, the fulfillment center jobs, and there’s the prospect of automating; of whether some jobs will be automated out of existence or whether there will be more automated fulfillment centers, and whether—there’s some concern that there’s a bifurcated workforce; that people that work the warehouse jobs, which are the vast number of people that work for Amazon, and then of course there’s the skilled technical talent.And how much thinking goes on inside of Amazon about a bifurcated workforce?

So I think we’re a long way off from automating the fulfillment centers.We’ve added, I think, 200,000 robots in the last several years and hired 300,000 people.So we’re automating, and the automation is improving efficiency, and it’s changing some jobs.It makes it—for example, it eliminates some of the walking for associates.It makes picking easier because you’re really selecting from a smaller number of items.I don’t—I think we’re a long way off from what you’d call a lights-out facility.

On the—from a bifurcated workforce standpoint, I think that our employees in our fulfillment centers across the logistics chain are core to delivering that customer delight.We open up our fulfillment centers to anybody over the age of 6, so if you haven’t been to one, I would encourage you to go take a look, because that’s where the magic happens.And I think that programs like Career Choice that create the opportunity for people who may not have a lot of opportunity with respect to the skills that they have in matching with jobs that are available, Career Choice is a program that broadens those choices.And I think that that’s how we think about it.

… Here, you’re thinking about the future of work and what Amazon’s influence on the future of work will be.And in speaking to many employees who have worked in fulfillment centers and describing those jobs and asking them about things like Career Choice, they express the fact that yes, there’s good benefits and the pay is quite good, but they have expressed the fact that it’s very difficult for them to have a career at Amazon in some ways; that there’s a burnout because the jobs are so grueling.And I’m just wondering, does that sort of feedback resonate inside the company about what kind of jobs those are?

So my experience working in the fulfillment center is that it is a physical job.And they’re good jobs.We talked about wages and benefits and Career Choice.And in the hundreds of communities across the country where those jobs are, there may not be a career path with Amazon, because the next job that someone is interested in may be in IT, or it may be in the medical field, and those aren’t jobs that are available with Amazon, which is where Career Choice comes in, because it trains people for in-demand jobs in the community that pay more than we do.And in putting those things together, it creates that pathway and opportunity for nontraditional students.And we work really hard to remove friction.We bring the classes into our fulfillment centers.We offer them before and after shifts to remove friction for people, and it’s a first-dollar program.We’re paying 95% of the tuition upfront for employees to engage in those career paths so that they can in fact move up the career ladder, because there may not be that next job with Amazon in their local community.

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