Woolworths has announced a significant funding investment of $50 million to upskill its team to prepare them for the retail industry of the future.
The Woolworths Future of Work Fund will be invested over the next three years and will help upskill, reskill and redeploy team members impacted by industry disruption and technological change.
The key technical focus areas for training will be in digital, data analytics, machine learning and robotics, with further investment planned for advanced customer service skills, team leadership and agile ways of working.
The Fund is expected to support over 60,000 team members across store, eCommerce, supply chain and support office departments.
Woolworths Group CEO Brad Banducci said that the launch of the Fund comes as retail experiences rapid changes.
"Around the globe, retail is changing at the fastest pace we’ve seen in many decades.
"Technological advances in automation, predictive analytics, AI and cloud computing are making core retail processes much faster and more efficient than ever before.
"While these changes push our industry forward for the better, they’re also changing the nature of the day-to-day work many of our people do.
"That’s an exciting prospect on many levels, but it also creates uncertainty.
"As Australia’s largest private employer, we want to lead on this transition and ensure no team member is left behind by the wave of change we’re all riding.
"The Future of Work Fund is designed to equip our team members with new skills and capabilities that will not only serve their career within Woolworths, but across a number of industries," he said.
The launch of the Fund is supported by the introduction of a new online learning platform to offer team members easily accessible training, apprenticeship and mentoring support across Australia.
Over the coming months, the Fund will formalise partnerships with learning institutions and other stakeholders to ensure it takes an integrated and holistic approach.
As a boon for the retail industry as a whole, the knowledge from the program will be shared across the industry and other service sectors to help support economy-wide upskilling and training programs.
Banducci added that while automation is often cited as the end of human jobs, he believes that the supermarket will be employing more people than ever before in the future.
In fact, the supermarket employs more people now than it did when it first introduced self-serve checkouts.
"In 2021, we’re the proud employer of more than 200,000 Australians.
"Despite a wave of technological change ahead, we truly believe we’ll have many more people working in our business by 2030.
"Where they work and what they do will change.
"There will be a much stronger emphasis on service and personal interactions with customers, which will be good for customers and our business," he said.
A sure sign of the emphasis on personal experiences, the fastest-growing role at Woolworths in 2020 was the personal shopper, with the business employing 25,000 personal shoppers.