Amazon and Tesla Pledge to Train Veterans for Tech Jobs

The US Department of Labor has joined forces with Amazon, Tesla, and a handful of other leading tech companies to promote an apprenticeship program for veterans and military families.

Amazon alone plans to create over 25,000 positions using the program, playing an important role in creating a job market that doesn’t punish veterans for dedicating years of their youth to serve their country. Even with tuition benefits available to veterans, many find themselves unable to “catch up” with the job market. The return of apprenticeships as a career option for specific, technical jobs in technology is something that app developers have been pushing for years, both officially through “coding bootcamps” like Hack Reactor and unofficially in the choice to hire workers with less formal education and more real-world on-the-job training.

While the apprenticeship program is a great move for Amazon and Tesla, a suprising amount of US tech companies and mobile app development agencies are notably absent from the list—Apple and Google, in particular, have yet to indicate if they will be pursuing similar programs in the near future.

App developers in NYC and elsewhere have been working hard to make tech jobs more open for a variety of demographics and backgrounds. Small-town America also has interesting programs cropping up—with coding bootcamps targeting unemployed coal miners and other groups at risk in a dwindling job market.

According to the DOL, over 206,000 people entered the registered apprenticeship system in the past year, showing that while the formal education system may be failing many Americans, US companies are willing to step in and do their part to help. The system may be broken, but app developers can be relied on to do their part in educating and employing a diverse workforce, here in America, in the rapidly growing mobile market.