Amazon to Add 80,000 New Jobs This Holiday Season

Amazon Inc, the world famous e-commerce giant, announced Thursday that it will be adding extra 80,000 jobs across its U.S. network and fulfillment centers this upcoming holiday season.

Usually, Amazon adds a number of temporary workers at its centers during the holiday season to meet the surge in demand from customers. This time, the e-tailer promises to add 14 percent more part-time jobs than it did last year.

"So far this year, we have converted more than 10,000 seasonal employees in the U.S. into regular, full-time roles and we're looking forward to converting thousands more across our growing network of fulfillment and sortation centers after this holiday season," Mike Roth, Amazon's vice president of North America operations said in a statement.

 "We're excited to be creating 80,000 seasonal jobs, thousands of which will lead to regular, full-time roles with benefits starting on day one and innovative programs like Career Choice for employees to further pursue their education," he added.

The company said that it would convert some of its part-time employees into full-time workers and also offers attractive incentives.

"Amazon also offers regular full-time employees innovative programs like Career Choice, where it will pre-pay up to 95 percent of tuition for courses related to in-demand fields, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at Amazon. Since the program's launch, employees are pursuing degrees in game design and visual communications, nursing, IT programming and radiology, to name a few," the company said.

Earlier this month, it was also reported that Amazon was opening its first physical store across the Empire State building in New York City for the holiday season. Though officials didn't confirm the news, several outlets claimed that the store could be an experimental ground for the internet retail juggernaut.

Amazon has about 50 warehouses across the U.S., which it calls fulfillment centers. They are different from the sorting centers. Amazon expects to have at least 15 sorting centers by the end of the year for greater productivity.

Analysts believe that the increase in staffing could help boost Amazon's revenue by 20 percent, The Wall Street Journal reports.