Walmart — the Dallas-Fort Worth area’s largest private employer — has rolled out a new slate of bonuses and educational opportunities to locations in Texas and nationwide.
The four-pronged initiative announced Wednesday aims to give workers the necessary trade skills to broaden their career prospects alongside rewards for longtime service with the company. Approximately 73,000 of the roughly 176,000 Walmart employees across Texas will be eligible for the incentives.
“For Walmart to be the best place to shop, we also need it to be the best place to work. That idea is the North Star of our journey to build a better company for our associates,” Walmart U.S. president and CEO John Furner wrote on the company’s corporate blog.
In an effort to ease labor shortages, the “Associate to Technician” pipeline program will launch with 100 employees in D-FW receiving training for more technical roles including maintenance, refrigeration, HVAC and automation.
Additional sponsorships will provide more than 50 short-term skills education opportunities that will take a few months instead of a few years to complete.
Walmart estimates that these efforts will help fill 100,000 jobs nationally across various sectors, from store leadership to behind-the-scenes roles in software engineering and supply-chain management. This is intended to remove the need for college degrees — which it continues to sponsor through partner institutions like Purdue Global and the University of Arkansas — in some of its more specialized jobs in transportation, technology and health/medicine.
Alongside new educational opportunities, the company announced that full- and part-time employees who have been with Walmart for at least one year are eligible for a new associate bonus, up to $1,000 annually. The longer an employee has been with the company, the higher their earnings potential.
Although Walmart’s new initiatives are national, it has made a concentrated effort in recent years to invest in the growth of its Texas locations, its biggest market. Since 2022, Walmart has remodeled more than 200 stores across the state and 75 in North Texas alone, with more planned. As of March 11, D-FW has more than 150 stores with three more under construction this summer in Frisco, Celina and Melissa.
