Mac Guile, who runs the meat department, stocks shelves at the Walmart in Fulton, New York, in July. Guile, who started at Walmart at 19 as a janitor, says the most useful lesson he learned at the Walmart Academy was how to motivate his workers. (Roger Kisby/The New York Times)

FULTON, N.Y. —

T he procession started in toys, marched through electronics, down into grocery and past the registers at the front end.

Fifty-one men and women, dressed in shimmering blue and yellow caps and gowns, walked through the Walmart to receive certificates on a stage set up in the store’s lawn and garden department. A bagpiper, wearing a kilt, led the graduates through the aisles.

For Roy Walts, it was the first time he had ever graduated from anything.

He dropped out of school in the ninth grade after his father died of cancer and his stepmother told him to leave the house. At 15, he lived in a Salvation Army clothing collection box. One Christmas night he ate cookies from a dumpster.

So as Walts, 53, crossed the stage that April morning in front of the local mayor, Walmart’s regional manager for upstate New York, and his son, who had worked overnight stocking freezers, he had butterflies in his stomach.

“I thought for sure I would trip walking up on that stage,” recalled Walts, the automotive department manager.

Walts is a graduate of Walmart Academy, one of the largest employer training programs in the country. Since March 2016, Walmart has put more than 150,000 of its store supervisors and department managers through the training, which teaches things like merchandising and how to motivate employees over several weeks.

An additional 380,000 entry-level workers have taken part in a separate training program called Pathways. Most of these workers receive a $1-an-hour raise for completing the course.

U.S. companies spend about $170 billion a year on formal employee training, but the majority of that instruction focuses on workers with college degrees.

Walmart has spent $2.7 billion on training and raising wages for 1.2 million of its store workers over the past two years — an investment that reflects the pressures the company faces in the retail industry.

Fighting Amazon for sales, Walmart is trying to make its stores more pleasant places to shop. That requires a well-trained workforce with a sense of purpose and self-worth, qualities that can be difficult to nurture in lower-wage workers.

But it is not clear whether all this training is teaching workers valuable skills that could enable them to move into the middle class or whether it is mostly making them better Walmart employees.

And even with more skills, many retail workers may never be able to earn what factory workers made in places like Fulton, a faded manufacturing hub near Syracuse.

“It is going to be very hard to replace what we’ve lost,” said Fulton’s mayor, Ronald Woodward. “Retail jobs don’t compare to manufacturing.”

In a study funded by Walmart, researchers at the National Skills Coalition, a nonprofit group that promotes investment in training, found that 60 percent of retail workers are not proficient in reading, and 70 percent have difficulty working with numbers.

The Pathways program addresses some of these issues by teaching “retail” math, or basic numeric skills a worker might need at the register or stocking shelves.

The academy is geared to more experienced supervisors and department managers. Working in classrooms set up in 150 Walmarts around the country, employees learn how to calculate profit and loss statements and how to run their department like a small business.

“The caps and gowns, the symbolism, these are not trivial things,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “They are trying to create this feeling among employees that ‘we are the store.’ They are taking small-town America and putting it into Walmart. Is that a bad thing? No.”

Other researchers say what many Walmart workers need most is not training, but higher wages. The training programs, they say, may be helpful in boosting loyalty and performance, but increasing pay would benefit workers most.

Two years ago, the company raised its starting wage to $9 an hour, a $1.75 increase from the federal minimum wage.

“If Walmart really wanted to invest in its workers, it would start people at $15 companywide and adequately staff its stores so they can service customers,” said Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Project, which lobbies for low-wage workers.

Fulton, a city of about 11,400 people, was once known for producing one very important thing: chocolate.

Specifically, Fulton was home to a factory that made Nestlé Crunch bars. On humid days, before a summer rain, the smell of chocolate wafted through the city.

The company shut the factory and moved operations to Wisconsin in 2003 to consolidate its production facilities and “increase the utilization of assets,” a Nestlé spokeswoman said in an email.

“I think what everyone misses most,” said Geoff Raponi, manager of the Fulton Walmart Supercenter, “is the smell.”

They also miss the jobs — more than 1,500 of them when the factory was booming in the mid-1980s, according to Woodward, the mayor. The local Walmart has about 300 employees.

Mac Guile, 24, was almost 6 years old when the chocolate works closed. He was living with his grandmother, who poured molten chocolate into bars, and his grandfather, who delivered supplies to the factory. They lived in a spacious house across from a McDonald’s, where Guile was known as the store’s mascot because of his name — Mac — and the fact that he ate breakfast there almost every day.

After Nestlé left town, Guile moved with his grandparents into a trailer. There were no more daily McDonald’s breakfasts and often little food at all. Guile and his younger brother took baths with water warmed on the stove.

At 19, Guile got a job at the Fulton Walmart Supercenter as a part-time janitor, earning $7.50 an hour. He did not have enough money to pay for utilities in his apartment for the first few months, so he showered at a relative’s house.

He now runs the meat department, a wall of refrigerated shelves, spanning from chicken thighs to Hofmann’s hot dogs, a Syracuse-area favorite.

He likes meat because of the fast pace and customer demands. He has memorized the internal temperature that pork, chicken and beef need to reach for safety, and recommends a variety of sauces and rubs.

The Walmart Academy classes appealed to Guile because they were more like discussions than lectures. Instead of being scolded for using their phones, students were encouraged to look things up. He was impressed that the program was held in a real classroom equipped with tablets.

The most useful lesson Guile learned at the academy was how to motivate his workers. “Have more one-on-one conversations, that is key,” said Guile, who has a brown beard and a tattoo that proclaims, “It is what it is.”

He now earns about $15 an hour, has a 401(k) retirement account with matching contributions from Walmart, and receives bonuses.

His former supervisor recommended him for the assistant store manager program, which could put him on track to manage a store one day — a job that pays an average of $170,000 a year.

When Fulton’s Walmart Academy graduated its first class, the store presented the mayor with a gift. It was a brick pulled from the rubble of the Nestlé factory, which is being demolished 14 years after Nestlé left.

“A piece of Nestle History,” read the inscription on the brick. “Presented this day 25th of April 2017.”

Woodward, who is serving his third four-year term as mayor, appreciates Walmart’s training program, but he says he thinks it will take more to save his city’s economy.

“I love this town,” Woodward said. “I will do anything to help it.”

That includes showing up one morning at the Walmart to attend the academy graduation.

Woodward appreciates that the supercenter provides steady jobs during a tough economic time. But in his mind, these are not the kind of jobs that earned Fulton the nickname “the largest small city in the state.” In the past few decades, Birds Eye foods and Miller Brewing also closed plants in the Fulton area that once employed hundreds of people.

“You could graduate from high school, work at a place like Nestlé, buy a car and send your kids to college,” Woodward said.

When the Nestlé plant was roaring in 1985, the average wage in Oswego County, which includes Fulton, was about $51,000. Today, the average pay is 18 percent less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal agency.

Walmart declined to disclose the wages at the Fulton store. But the company said that at its stores in New York state, full-time workers earned an average of $14.10 an hour. Part-time workers make an average of $11.10 an hour.

The company says its training programs are intended to help employees advance into higher-paying jobs at Walmart or in other industries.

“Whether they are coming to us for two years or 20 years, we want them to have the skills that allow them to create opportunities,” said Kathleen McLaughlin, who runs the Walmart Foundation and also holds the title chief sustainability officer.