Over the next 12 months, Amazon would hire 30,000 part-time Employees as the American e-commerce giant expands its operations. About 25,000 of the workers would be deployed to sorting and fulfillments centers across the U.S.
Work-from-home jobs
The remaining 5,000 openings are for customer service representatives who would have the option to work from home. As part-time workers, the new employees could work 20 hours or more and receive benefits. The benefits include being eligible to be part of Amazon’s Career Choice program which pre-pays 95 percent of the employee’s tuition for those working in fields Amazon considers in demand, Fortune reported.
The 30,000 part-time jobs that Amazon announced on Thursday is on top of a plan announced in January to employ 100,000 full-time workers by the middle of 2018. If Amazon pushed through with the two phases of hiring, the company’s payroll would expand to over 300,000 employees by the end of 2018.
New fulfillment centers
The hiring spree is in response to Amazon’s plan to open new fulfillment centers not only in the U.S. but also in other countries. The company is also into the development of drone technology so it could shift some of its deliveries using unmanned aerial vehicles while expanding its same-day delivery service.
Although the drones could replace some tasks performed by humans, Amazon still considers people as critical to its operations to ensure goods ordered by customers are delivered on time and on a budget.
Human supervision is still needed because automation could result in some problems such as the recent report that Amazon canceled some preorders for the game “Persona 5 Take Your Heart” premium and Steelbook editions.
Canceled pre-orders and cloud crashes
Some customers complained they receive emails from the e-commerce giant that their orders for the PlayStation 4 game have products considered dangerous.
The emails led to speculation that there is mass cancellation of customer orders for the Altus game ahead of its official release.
In March, Amazon also suffered from rumors that Amazon Web Services, its cloud service, crashed. Thousands of users around the world are dependent on the service such as Netflix and Spotify, major providers of streaming services. Amazon’s cloud service provides customers with back-end access to the internet, cutting the need for companies for standard operating infrastructure.
