Program Manager, Amazon Career Choice

Overview

The Associate Development organization owns global management and innovation of the Career Choice, Career Skills and The Offer programs. From Career Skills to Career Choice to The Offer, we are committed to upskilling front-line associates and empowering career choice.

What accounts for Career Choice’s peculiar success? Unlike most tuition programs, Career Choice starts with the employees’ end goal – a rewarding career path in an in-demand field in the local area – and works backward to deliver impact. Amazon funds programs that match local labor market needs and connect students with local hiring opportunities across key sectors of the economy from advanced manufacturing, to healthcare and information technology.

Career Choice is more than simply a tuition payment program as we seek to simplify returning to school for our associates. We partner with community colleges and education providers to bring classes on-site to our fulfillment centers.

And this year, Amazon is making it easier for employees to join the program. The program also launched its own website, www.AmazonCareerChoice.com, giving employees a single platform to apply for tuition assistance, manage their benefits and learn about Career Choice.

Roles and Responsibilities

The Amazon Associate Development team has an opportunity to be part of something big – working on the Amazon Career Choice and Career Skills programs in North America! If you are a self-motivated talented Program Manager with experience in creating, road-mapping, and driving large scale people development programs, then you should consider growing your career with us. This role will focus on managing and innovating programs to simplify and scale the education experience for associates. Our team takes a data based approach to measure success and focus efforts on activity that drives successful upskilling of employee participants in our programs.

Traditional program management experience is required. You will execute end to end definition and scoping of projects which deliver tools to thousands of employees across North America and across multiple business units. You will build resourcing and dependency plans to arrive at launch dates, work with cross functional resources, and manage and resolve risks and issues, anticipate and make tradeoffs, and balance business needs versus technical constraints. The ideal candidate thrives in an environment where they are responsible for envisioning creative solutions, and using data to inspect success and validate these ideas. You constantly strive to expand our understanding of the employee lifecycle metrics which matter to associate development. You don’t create processes for one associate but build systems that enable associates globally to own and drive their career in a friction-free and scalable environment, without required intervention from the Career Choice team. You think big to continuously build new products and services that enable our people and business to grow.

As an Amazon Associate Development (AD) Program Manager, you will manage the implementation of Career Choice and Career Skills programs in North America. The ability to use both formal and informal influencing skills across Amazon’s cross-matrix organization is critical to the success of this role. Your communication skills – both verbal and written – will need to be excellent, and you will be able to clearly communicate to cross functional audiences at all levels in the organization, including senior management.

Primary responsibilities:

· Leads complex medium to large scale projects that are business critical, and may be global in nature. May lead other program managers for large projects
· Recommends improvements to the way projects are scoped, built, tested and deployed
· Supports critical relationships and negotiations of agreements with customers, suppliers or other external partners
· Writes clear and detailed functional specifications based on complex business requirements
· May set and/or collaborate on business objectives in order to deliver best product/feature or system/process with most efficient use of resources and technologies
· Applies advanced knowledge of functional area to coordinate program design and launch within schedule and budget constraints
· Makes optimal tradeoffs between schedule, resources, and scope, and applies advanced business knowledge to address major risks, challenges and obstacles
· Anticipates, identifies and drives resolution of challenges and interdependencies to prevent downstream problems
· Relies heavily on influence –not authority – to drive teams and resources toward project goals
· Decisions have significant impact on resources, features, and schedules. Plays a significant role with business leaders to determine potential risks to a schedule and make difficult tradeoff decisions
· Strong proven program and project management skills, preferably with a formal qualification in project management
· The ability to understand business goals, system platforms and processes and recommend new approaches and procedures to effect standardization and improvements.
· Supports the development of flexible and sustainable program enhancements across the network incorporating scalable and standard approaches
· Develops and delivers executive-level presentations to support the program and inform stakeholders and business leaders
· Experience using operational metrics to drive process improvement and efficiencies with a focus on creating scalable processes.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Technology, Science, HR or related field
• 5+ years’ experience in large-scale program management across multiple geographies

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Process improvement experience such as Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen, and/or Operational Excellence.
• Proven success record in team leadership and mentoring
• MBA/MS/MA preferred

Amazon is an Equal Opportunity-Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation.