A storm is coming. As experienced professionals in fields including manufacturing and transportation retire, many occupations will become increasingly difficult to recruit for, worsening the existing skills shortage.
Walmart, the world’s largest company by revenue, is turning to its 2.1 million global employees to fill the gaps.
When the company realized it would need to fill 100,000 “higher-paying and in-demand” roles within the next three years, it decided to focus on developing its existing employees. Lo Stomski, Walmart’s chief talent officer, is leading the team focused on making this talent strategy possible at Walmart.
“We try to create 2.1 million unique career paths for our associates,” Stomski said of the initiative during a press panel at the Workday Rising conference.
“If you think about Walmart, you do naturally think about our store associates, but we have cyber security analysts, we have pilots, we have product managers, we have all kinds of roles that a lot of people aren’t aware of,” Stomski added. “I view my job, the team’s job, to help our associates discover amazing career paths so that they can have pathways to opportunity and higher paying jobs.”
In recent years, Walmart has expanded a host of initiatives intended to help its workers identify and pursue opportunities within the company, including Walmart Academy, designed to offer global associates in-person and virtual training programs, and Live Better U, which provides employees free access to GED classes, college degree programs, and certificate courses.
The company has also rolled out new initiatives, including “career explorer,” an AI tool that can recommend roles for employees based on their career aspirations and personal interests, as well as several upskilling programs. Stomski recently sat down with HR Brew to discuss some of these initiatives.
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Starting from the middle (management). In 2022, Walmart rolled out its Manager Academy, a week-long leadership training course, for which store managers are flown to the company’s Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters. Managers are important players in employees’ professional development, Stomski said, but they need leadership and coaching skills to encourage their growth.
“Those managers need to be ambassadors to actually show what opportunity is available to their associates,” Stomski said.
Eye on upskilling. The retailer has also created professional development tracks specific to in-demand roles.
In 2022, Walmart launched a pilot program to train supply chain employees to earn their commercial driver’s license (CDL) and join Walmart’s private fleet of drivers. Following its success, the company expanded the program to include its employees in stores, distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and transportation offices within 50 miles of participating offices. Now dubbed “associate to driver,” the 12-week program has helped prepare participants for roles in which they can earn as much as $110,000 within their first year.
“When you talk about access to opportunity and economic mobility, that is massive. It can change so many lives,” Stomski said.
Walmart then replicated this program for other in-demand roles, including certified technicians.
The six-month pilot for this initiative began earlier this year and is training 100 frontline associates in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to become certified technicians who can work in facilities maintenance, refrigeration and HVAC, reliability and automation technician roles. The program includes a mix of in-classroom instruction and on-the-job learning with an experienced technician.
“We’re leveraging our own talent marketplace to actually fulfill that need. We’re super excited about that,” Stomski said.