BeachCoders Academy helping to fill $150K Amazon tech jobs
September 21, 2020 Manhattan Beach, CA BeachCoders® Academy is proud to be a force for good in tech training and part of the solution to help train the new lineup at Amazon for great tech careers.
(Reprinted from Amazon’s Day-One site)
Amazon—the largest job creator in the U.S. over the last decade—will host Career Day this Wednesday, Sept. 16, a nationwide virtual event to help job seekers find and prepare for their next job.
Amazon Career Day will give its attendees the chance to learn about the more than 100,000 available jobs across Amazon’s operations network, as well as the 33,000 open corporate and tech roles that support businesses like Alexa, Amazon Web Services, operations technology, and Prime Video – among others. All Amazon jobs come with industry-leading pay and competitive benefits from day one, including a minimum wage of at least $15/hour, health insurance, up to 20 weeks of parental leave, and company-funded upskilling opportunities.
The free event will start streaming this Wednesday, September 23, 2020 at 12 p.m. ET and will include three hours of fireside chats, panels, and discussions with career experts and Amazon executives providing advice, insights, and tips on how to find your next job. It will be headlined by TV host and activist Karamo and former NFL player and NASA astronaut Leland Melvin. You can watch it by visiting www.amazon.jobs/careerday
“COVID-19 continues to affect millions of people across the country, and people are eager for the opportunity to get back to work,” said Beth Galetti, Senior Vice President of Human Resources at Amazon. “We’re continuing to hire people from all backgrounds and at all skill levels, and we’re glad to be able to mobilize our team of experienced recruiters and HR professionals to help job seekers across the country learn about opportunities at Amazon and elsewhere.”
From Career Day to Amazon
Last year, 17,000 job seekers attended Amazon Career Day at events in six U.S. cities, and more than 200,000 people applied for jobs in the week leading up to the event. James Tupper-Bridges attended the 2019 event in Seattle with hopes of landing a job at Amazon that would build on his experience waiting tables at a fine dining steakhouse. He was hired as a part-time associate at Amazon Go Grocery and, within six months, was promoted to store lead.
“I learned that the skills I had developed at restaurants applied perfectly to Amazon’s Leadership Principles and would be useful in Amazon’s retail stores,” Tupper-Bridges said. “Customer Obsession, Insist on the Highest Standards, Earn Trust—these all were things I had focused on in restaurants, though at the time I didn’t know they were a fundamental part of Amazon’s approach to the customer experience.”
Daniel Frommeyer stopped by the Chicago event out of sheer curiosity and chatted with an Amazon recruiter. “I brought up my own concerns as a potential candidate at a company like Amazon because my five years of recruiting experience was in the food manufacturing industry, with little to no experience in the tech or cloud industry. I’d never recruited or even spoken to a programmer before,” he said.
The response from the recruiter resonated. “He said, ‘We can teach someone tech, but we can’t teach someone to be passionate and love recruiting,’” recalled Frommeyer, who was encouraged to apply for an Amazon sourcing recruiter position in Chicago. He got an invitation for an interview on a Tuesday, interviewed on Wednesday, and accepted an offer on Friday morning.
“I was shocked … 72 hours after receiving the email to interview, my dream comes true,” Frommeyer said. Fast-forward to today, and James has volunteered to help with Career Day 2020 to give back, and help job seekers who are in the same position he was in last year: “I will never stop learning and being curious.”
Reacting to an evolving job market
More than half of American job seekers are looking for work as a result of COVID-19, and 61% are pursuing opportunities in a different industry, according to a recent survey by Amazon and Morning Consult. The pandemic is challenging professionals to translate their experiences to new fields.
“Events like this are incredibly important in helping job seekers develop a game plan and feel confident about their path,” said Amanda Augustine, a career advice expert with TopResume who will join an Amazon Career Day panel on how to stand out in the hiring process “A lot of people are claiming unemployment for the first time ever and, therefore, may not know where to start.”
A silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Augustine, is the fact that career fairs and industry conferences have moved online, making them more accessible and affordable.
“Networking hasn’t died… it has just gone virtual,” Augustine said. “Professional organizations and meetup groups are now location-agnostic, so opportunities for connection and knowledge-building are endless.”