Want a Successful Career? Amazon CEO Andy Jassy Has Some Blunt Advice for Gen Z Workers
Andy Jassy’s own early career was marked by experimentation and figuring out what he didn’t want to do.
Key Takeaways
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says Gen Z workers have to “start at the bottom,” take on unglamorous work and prove they are reliable, meticulous and tireless before bigger opportunities arise.
- Over nearly three decades at Amazon, Jassy has seen that standout performers are “learning machines” who constantly seek new skills.
- Drawing on his own experience, Jassy says his early career was about experimenting and figuring out what he didn’t want to do, not nailing a perfect plan.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, 58, says that Gen Z won’t get their dream jobs on day one. His latest advice to the generation of young workers is to “pay your dues” to be successful.
“You have to be willing to start at the bottom,” Jassy said earlier this year on Capital Group’s Power of Advice podcast. “You have to do whatever people ask you to do, within reason.”
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.
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.
“You just have to be a learning machine,” Jassy told the podcast.
Jassy never planned to make it to the C-suite
Jassy initially dreamt about athletics and sportscasting rather than running a tech giant, according to The New York Times. In an Amazon blog post, 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.
“It’s great to have an idea,” Jassy said on the podcast. “But it’s very useful to try a lot of different things to figure out what you don’t like and what you do like.”
After several years of bouncing between jobs, Jassy went back to school for an MBA at Harvard Business School in the mid‑1990s. That proved to be a turning point. GMAC, a non-profit association of leading graduate business schools, notes that in 1997, days after finishing the MBA program, he joined Amazon.
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’s music sales business, per Business Insider.
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’s infrastructure expertise into a standalone cloud business, per Technology Magazine.
AWS launched in 2006 and eventually became Amazon’s most profitable division, cementing Jassy as one of the company’s most important leaders well before he took over as CEO in 2021.
“You never know which things you’re going to like,” Jassy said on the podcast. “In my lifetime, I have not predicted the things that I have loved.”
Key Takeaways
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says Gen Z workers have to “start at the bottom,” take on unglamorous work and prove they are reliable, meticulous and tireless before bigger opportunities arise.
- Over nearly three decades at Amazon, Jassy has seen that standout performers are “learning machines” who constantly seek new skills.
- Drawing on his own experience, Jassy says his early career was about experimenting and figuring out what he didn’t want to do, not nailing a perfect plan.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, 58, says that Gen Z won’t get their dream jobs on day one. His latest advice to the generation of young workers is to “pay your dues” to be successful.
“You have to be willing to start at the bottom,” Jassy said earlier this year on Capital Group’s Power of Advice podcast. “You have to do whatever people ask you to do, within reason.”
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.
