Meta launches $115 million skilled trades academy with guaranteed jobs

Tech giant Meta on Monday announced that it’s launching a new academy for workers to receive training in a skilled trade at no cost with a job guaranteed for all graduates.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is creating the America’s Workforce Academy (AWA) with an initial investment of $115 million in the program’s first year. It will start with pilot locations in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana and Texas this year.

Graduates of the program will receive a National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) credential as well as an America’s Workforce Certificate – both of which are designed to travel with the worker across employers and industry sectors.

“The AI revolution is bringing change but also historic opportunities. Skilled workers electrified rural America one pole at a time. They manned the factories that built the arsenal that won World War II. Now a new generation will pour the foundations and lay the fiber that secures American strength in this new age,” said Dina Powell McCormick, Meta president and vice-chairman.

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The AI boom and rapid build out of data centers helped spur Meta in launching America’s Workforce Academy. (Ben Torres/Bloomberg)

“We can’t create the infrastructure that we need if we don’t have the electricians, the fiber technicians … ” she said during a Tuesday morning appearance on Fox Business Networks “Mornings with Maria.”

Meta said in its announcement that this initiative is the largest private-sector commitment to the skilled trades with a job guarantee in U.S. history. The move comes amid a shortage of workers in the skilled trades that is being exacerbated by the rapid buildout of infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) data centers.

Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centers at Meta, said: “The AI infrastructure we’re building today requires an incredible workforce to make it a reality.” 

“America’s Workforce Academy is our commitment to building that workforce with the same ambition and long-term thinking we bring to the technology itself. America needs hundreds of thousands of skilled tradespeople — electricians, mechanics, fiber technicians and more — and this program creates clear, accessible pathways into those careers,” Peterson added.

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Mike Rowe, CEO of the mikeroweWORKS Foundation, said that the new initiative will help encourage more Americans to pursue careers in the skilled trades while also revolutionizing the way those workers are trained.

“Closing America’s skills gap requires us to not…