At Amazon, we're really excited about and proud of our Career Choice Program. This innovative employee benefit pre-pays 95 percent of tuition for employees to take college and industry certification courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon.
Our associates love the program and today thousands of employees in 10 countries are taking the next steps toward the career of their dreams, whether at Amazon or elsewhere.
Today we’re pleased to announce plans to create an additional 25 dedicated on site Career Choice classrooms at our fulfillment centers. More than a dozen of our existing fulfillment centers will be retro-fitted with state-of-the-art classrooms equipped to host courses in nursing, engineering, IT, accounting and more. And beginning this year, our new fulfillment centers will be built with on site classrooms as part of their standard blueprint.
And Amazon employees won’t be the only ones to benefit. We’re excited to now offer the Career Choice Program to employees at our subsidiary companies, including Audible, Quidsi, ShopBop, CreateSpace and more.
We've been continuously improving our Career Choice Program since Day One and in 2015 we expanded the initiative to include purpose-built classrooms on site at eight of our U.S. fulfillment centers. We found that offering courses on site helped associates be more successful in achieving their aspirations at Amazon or beyond.
These classrooms feature high-end technology and are designed with glass walls. Not only does bringing classes to employees cut down on commute times and transportation needs, it inspires others to participate and generates encouragement from peers. And the numbers back this up - Career Choice participation rates at fulfillment centers with dedicated on site classrooms have risen by 107 percent since the classrooms were built.
We believe the Career Choice Program is a unique benefit that helps us attract the very best talent to serve our customers. At the same time, Amazon and subsidiary jobs can become stepping stones to continued career advancement internally or as bridges to other in-demand fields. Some of our associates, like Dana from Pennsylvania, will graduate from nursing school and find careers at the local hospital to care for patients right in their own community. Others might join Crystal from Kentucky on the open road with a commercial driver’s license and their own truck, just like she did. We can’t wait to see what our other associates choose to study this year and what great things they’ll achieve!
