Amazon plans to create 1,000 new permanent positions across UK in 2016. This follows the earlier announcement made by the e-commerce platform in January to create 2,500 new posts, in preparation for the festive season.
This includes resourcing Amazon’s fastest delivery service Prime Now, which a year after launch is now available to more than 30% of the UK population. The new jobs created will be spread across London, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Leicestershire and Manchester.
This announcement coincided with the release of Amazon UK’s bi-annual shopping and entertainment trends report, which highlights popular products from its selection of more than 150 million items across more than 35 product categories.
Doug Gurr, UK Country Manager, for Amazon said: “We are creating thousands of new jobs to continue to deliver the experience our customers know and love during the festive season and beyond. We are hiring for all types of roles from software engineers, computer programmers and corporate managers in our R&D centers and head office, to operations managers, engineers, service technicians, HR roles and order fulfillment roles in our fulfillment centres.”
This move by the e-commerce giant will bring the total number of full time permanent employees to more than 15,500 by the end of this year.
The new recruits will be working at the company’s UK head office in London; Research and Development (R&D) centres in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London; the customer service centre in Edinburgh; fulfillment centres and delivery stations across the UK; the Fashion Photography Studio in Shoreditch, and to run the Amazon Web Services (AWS) UK Region due to be in place by early 2017.
Amazon has invested more than £4.6bn into the UK economy since 2010, and the news comes just weeks after business networking site LinkedIn ranked Amazon one of the top ten UK companies for both attracting and retaining talent.
Brexit seems to have made no impact on the company’s growth and expansion plans for the year ahead. “Our sales are in line with expectations. It’s business as usual as far as we are concerned,” Doug told BBC News.
Doug also said: “We don’t know what the impact will be. As far as we’re concerned right now, we’re keeping our heads down and continuing to do what we do. We’ll deal with whatever situation arises.”
