Walmart, Amazon and a nonprofit train the workforce of tomorrow.

As Car Week gave way to Labor Day, a very different version of star power was on display at the Monterey Marriott last week. Wendy Peterson, worldwide manager of career choice for Amazon, was joined by Brian Poland, Walmart’s national director of lifelong learning, to talk to a roomful of California workforce professionals about techniques that the private sector is deploying to raise the living standards of the working poor. Say what?

It’s true. Amazon is paying (not reimbursing, but paying outright) for its lowest-earning frontline employees to get career training and educational credentials so that those folks can advance professionally outside Amazon. The company will pay up to $3,000 a year for up to four years for warehouse workers or customer service reps to become certified medical technicians, AutoCAD draftspeople, or licensed long-haul truck drivers, or to get a GED or associate’s degree.

Walmart offers its employees tuition assistance and university classes, and works to help them get college credit for the duties they perform as part of their jobs. The largest retailer in the world will pay for any employee or a relative of the employee to get a GED while employed. They offer a program called Pathways for low-wage frontline employees to get training and a credential so they can increase their income, whether within or outside Walmart.

It was a stunner for me.

Not so for Jamie Fall, the director of UpSkill America at the Aspen Institute, and the fellow who invited me to join the Walmart and Amazon folks. Fall says such private sector actions are part of the strategy to combat income inequality and alleviate poverty. According to his data, 20 percent of American workers – 40 million working people – lack a high school diploma. For most of these people, career advancement is a myth: 60 percent of low-skilled workers earn less than $16,000 a year.

As a volunteer, I chair the Monterey County Workforce Development Board, made up of leaders from the private sector, labor unions, community colleges and public agencies. I was a panelist alongside the Amazon and Walmart execs at last week’s conference, called The Meeting of the Minds. In addition to highlighting the local private sector investments that Tanimura & Antle and the Pebble Beach Company are making in workforce housing in our area, I talked about how the Monterey County WDB oversaw the dispersal of approximately $8.5 million in federal money and served over 7,200 local workers with employment services in the past year.

Through its service providers, the WDB offers subsidies to business owners to defray the cost of training workers and helps with education and placement costs for job seekers.

The WDB is essentially the government alternative to the programs that Amazon and Walmart were showcasing. And like those private-sector operations, the focus at the WDB is on people in the community with the greatest barriers to career advancement.

As stunning as it was to discover the do-gooder aspects of America’s largest retailers, the most impressive take-away from the entire conference was the work being done by a little-known nonprofit organization based out of Oakland called Code for America. This is a bunch of tech geeks who are bringing a very modern digital mindset to the “business” of public service.

Code for America is harnessing the disruption and efficiencies that technology has brought to lots of industries (newspapers, for example) and deploying them in the cause of delivering the services that only government provides. They took California’s existing 51-page web-based application for food stamps – a cumbersome, out-of-date system – and put it on a phone where one can register in 10 minutes. If you need an appointment, they prompt you with a click-to-call button; if you are about to run out of benefits, they send you a text.

Code for America aims to do for the likes of Social Security and Health and Human Services what Airbnb has for hospitality. This outfit is proving that young engineers in tech have serious social aspirations and they’re providing something of a map of the road ahead in public policy problem solving. They look a lot like new tech stars.

ERIK CUSHMAN is the Weekly’s publisher.