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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, 58, says that Gen Z won\u2019t get their dream jobs on day one. His latest advice to the generation of young workers is to \u201cpay your dues\u201d to be successful.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to be willing to start at the bottom,\u201d Jassy said earlier this year on Capital Group\u2019s Power of Advice podcast<\/a>. \u201cYou have to do whatever people ask you to do, within reason.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Jassy told the podcast that young workers have to build a foundation and earn a reputation for being dependable, meticulous and hard-working. He said the people who rise through the ranks are the ones willing to do the unglamorous work without flinching, while those who avoid hard work tend to stall.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over nearly 30 years at Amazon, watching the company scale from a few hundred staffers to a 1.5 million employee giant, Jassy has seen one pattern again and again: the top performers are the ones fixed on learning and reinventing themselves, not simply repeating whatever worked last time.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou just have to be a learning machine,\u201d Jassy told the podcast.<\/p>\n Jassy initially dreamt about athletics and sportscasting rather than running a tech giant, according to The New York Times<\/a>. In an Amazon blog post<\/a>, the CEO notes that in his 20s, before joining Amazon, he spent time in sportscasting and sports production. He also worked in retail, including a job at a golf shop, and in coaching, working with his former high school soccer team<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s great to have an idea,\u201d Jassy said on the podcast. \u201cBut it\u2019s very useful to try a lot of different things to figure out what you don\u2019t like and what you do like.\u201d<\/p>\n After several years of bouncing between jobs, Jassy went back to school for an MBA at Harvard Business School in the mid\u20111990s. That proved to be a turning point. GMAC<\/a>, a non-profit association of leading graduate business schools, notes that in 1997, days after finishing the MBA program, he joined Amazon.<\/p>\n Jassy was hired as a marketing manager at a moment when Amazon had only around 250 employees and had just gone public. Early on, he worked on customer retention and marketing projects and later helped oversee the company\u2019s music sales business, per Business Insider<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2003, he helped pitch and then build what became Amazon Web Services (AWS), starting with a small internal team and the idea of turning Amazon\u2019s infrastructure expertise into a standalone cloud business, per Technology Magazine<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n AWS launched in 2006 and eventually became Amazon\u2019s most profitable division<\/a>, cementing Jassy as one of the company\u2019s most important leaders well before he took over as CEO in 2021<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou never know which things you\u2019re going to like,\u201d Jassy said on the podcast. \u201cIn my lifetime, I have not predicted the things that I have loved.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, 58, says that Gen Z won\u2019t get their dream jobs on day one. His latest advice to the generation of young workers is to \u201cpay your dues\u201d to be successful.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to be willing to start at the bottom,\u201d Jassy said earlier this year on Capital Group\u2019s Power of Advice podcast<\/a>. \u201cYou have to do whatever people ask you to do, within reason.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Jassy told the podcast that young workers have to build a foundation and earn a reputation for being dependable, meticulous and hard-working. He said the people who rise through the ranks are the ones willing to do the unglamorous work without flinching, while those who avoid hard work tend to stall.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nJassy never planned to make it to the C-suite<\/h2>\n
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