Amazon raised its minimum wage to that amount in 2018. According to Carney, the number of people applying to Amazon in October 2018, after the e-tailer announced its pay hike, was 850,000, nearly triple the number from one year earlier. This is not the first time an Amazon executive has publicly called for its competitors to raise their minimum wage. In April 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos dared other retailers to beat its pay and benefits package in his annual letter to shareholders. Bezos also cited Amazon benefits such as its Career Choice program, which pays up to 95% of tuition and fees towards a certificate or diploma in qualified fields of study, even if those employees wind up leaving Amazon. Meanwhile, Carney's blog post mentioned Upskilling 2025, Amazon's nearly $1 billion initiative to offer 100,000 U.S. employees across the company the opportunity to get trained in high-demand areas like medicine, software engineering, IT and machine learning.