by BERNAMA / pic by BLOOMBERG

SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon on Thursday launched the Amazon Returnship programme, a new initiative to help professionals get back to work after they lost or left their jobs – including people displaced by the impacts of COVID-19, reported Xinhua.

Through this initiative, Amazon is offering people who have been without a job or underemployed for at least a year a new opportunity to rejoin the workforce by restarting their careers at Amazon. The company plans to hire 1,000 professionals over the coming years as a result of this new programme.

“We understand life happens and sometimes an event affects career plans,” said Beth Galetti, senior vice-president of People Experience and Technology at Amazon. “Amazon’s new Returnship programme is designed to help professionals reintegrate into the workforce.”

The United States has seen a net loss of 4.5 million jobs held by women since February 2020, with nearly 2 million women leaving the labour force altogether, according to a May 2021 report from the National Women’s Law Centre.

Amazon expects that at least three out of every four participants in this programme will be women returning to the American workforce, adding that it plans to hire professionals for a variety of roles, ranging from financial analysts to software development engineers.