Amazon shuts down online course production team such as "free AWS tutorials"
Pinwan, October 27th, according to business insiders, Amazon's efforts to cut costs are spreading further across the company, with even small teams with modest financial expenses being axed.
It is understood that Amazon is planning to shut down an online learning team responsible for creating online programming and cloud computing tutorials. The company currently offers hundreds of courses on its eLearning site, many of which are free, on topics including data science and software engineering. A source familiar with the company's plans said the content will remain on the site, but the company won't make any further updates.
The team of less than 100 people was informed of the change last week. They can choose to leave Amazon with a severance package or find other positions within the company by February.
Amazon is also shutting down an online learning platform in India that offered tutoring sessions for students preparing for India's competitive engineering and medical school entrance exams, a current employee of the company said. The app, called Amazon Academy, will launch in the education technology market in January 2021, at a time when competition in the field has already become fierce.
The moves are among the strictest cost-cutting measures in Amazon's history. The e-commerce giant has regularly reinvested in its business over the past few decades, even if it means losing money. But moves like this show that the leadership team's biggest focus right now is the company's profitability, so they're not going anywhere.