Housewares Business-to-business magazine for housewares retailers and their suppliers
Online giant Amazon UK announced today (Monday February 20) that it plans to create more than 5,000 full-time jobs this year, taking the company’s total UK workforce to over 24,000.
Roles will be created at the UK head office in London; Customer Service Centre in Edinburgh; Fashion Photography Studio in Shoreditch; AWS Europe (London) Region office; Fulfilment Centres across the UK, including three new sites set to open in Tilbury, Doncaster and Daventry; as well as at Development Centres in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London. More than 1,500 roles will be based at these Development Centres and in AWS by the end of 2017.
Amazon also today announced a new apprenticeship programme, offering opportunities in engineering, logistics and warehousing roles in fulfilment centres across the country.
Doug Gurr, UK country manager of Amazon, commented: “We are creating thousands of new UK jobs including hundreds of apprenticeship opportunities, as we continue to innovate for our customers and provide them with even faster delivery, more selection and better value.
“We are hiring for all types of roles from flight test engineers, software engineers and corporate managers in our development centres and head office, to operations managers, supervisors, engineers, service technicians, HR roles and order fulfilment roles in our fulfilment centres.”
The company will work to hire as many individuals as possible from seasonal positions into these new permanent roles. The retailer said over 10,000 of the company’s 19,000 current employees started with the company in a seasonal role.
Amazon will also open a new head office this year in the 15-storey Principal Place at Shoreditch in east London.
Located on Norton Folgate, between Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street stations, Principal Place is a mixed-use development with a 600,000sq ft office building and an adjacent residential tower.
Last month, Amazon Web Services launched AWS re:Start, a free training and job placement programme for the UK to educate young adults as well as military veterans, reservists, and their spouses, on the latest software development and cloud computing technologies.
These initiatives are in addition to Amazon’s Career Choice programme, which helps train fulfilment centre employees for jobs at Amazon and other companies.
This programme pre-pays 95% of tuition for courses, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a future career at Amazon.
More than 2,000 employees across Europe have participated in Career Choice courses such as nursing, personal training and engineering.
Amazon will also maintain its 60 Holborn Viaduct office, providing capacity for more than 5,000 employees in the capital by the end of 2017.
