Walmart is going after high-school students in war for talent

FAN Editor

A Walmart worker organizes products for Christmas season at a Walmart store in Teterboro, New Jersey.

Eduardo Munoz | Reuters

Walmart has a new target for talent in a tight labor market: High school students.

The nation’s largest private employer, with a work force of 1.5 million people in the U.S., announced Tuesday that it plans to expand a previously announced college-education perk to high schoolers, hoping to get them off to a university to continue their education.

Here’s what high school students will now have access to, according to Walmart:

  • Jobs within Walmart with scheduling options for flexibility;
  • Free ACT and SAT prep courses;
  • Up to seven hours of free college credit through Walmart’s “Live Better U’s College Start” program; and
  • A debt-free college degree through “Live Better U” (upon completing high school) in three fields from six non-profit universities.

Walmart said less than 25,000 of its workers today are high school students, reflecting a “very small percentage” of its total workforce.

It’s also small compared with other companies in the retail industry, often because it can be hard to work around the students’ busy class schedules, Julie Murphy, executive vice president of Walmart’s U.S. people division, said during a call with members of the media. But, “we see this as a pipeline we can leverage that we currently aren’t leveraging today,” she said.

The announcement comes roughly one year after Walmart started subsidizing the cost of higher education for its employees who’ve yet to earn college degrees. It’s been doing this through a partnership with Guild Education — a tuition reimbursement and education platform that helps large employers extend education benefits, including tuition reimbursement, to workers. Walmart workers accepted into this program only have to contribute $1 per day, for 365 days each year, toward their education, so long as they’re enrolled. Walmart covers the rest of the tab.

On Tuesday, one day ahead of its annual shareholders meeting kicking off in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart also said it would expand the program by creating new scholarships for people who’ve not previously completed college credits — high-school students or otherwise. It said as many as 5,000 workers each year will be eligible for the awards valued at $1,500 each.

In addition, it’s adding three more universities to the program: Southern New Hampshire University, Purdue University Global and Wilmington University will join The University of Florida, Brandman University and Bellevue University in offering a chance for Walmart workers to earn degrees.

Walmart also is adding 14 new technology degrees and certificates for its workers to choose from in fields like computer science, cyber security and computing technology, and a certificate for Java programming. When this program launched in 2018, workers had to opt to obtain an associate’s or bachelor’s degree in either business or supply chain management.

The goal of all of this is that workers will acquire the skills Walmart knows it needs in the future, according to Drew Holler, senior vice president of associate experience for Walmart in the U.S. He said it’s also helping with retention and engagement with customers in stores, as enrolled employees are more committed to their work.

Walmart a year ago had said it expected as many as 68,000 of its employees could sign up for the new college program over the course of four to five years. Only about 7,500 people have enrolled to date.

“We have gone deliberately slow,” with sign-ups to the program, to start, Murphy said. “We expect this to ramp. [And] we think the [new] degrees we are offering will be instrumental … as we think about the future.”

Walmart is not the only employer looking to sweeten benefits as way to attract and retain top talent as unemployment hovers at near-record-low. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in his annual letter to shareholders in April issued a challenge to other retailers, not naming which ones specifically, to match its pay and benefits. Walmart’s minimum wage of $11 an hour, set in January 2018, is still below Amazon’s, which was hiked to $15 in November. “Do it! Better yet, go to $16,” Bezos said.

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