It’s not clear if workers are gaining valuable skills from Walmart’s efforts to provide training.

FULTON, N.Y. — The 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 over several weeks like merchandising and how to motivate employees.

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

Walmart has spent $2.7 billion on training and raising wages for 1.2 million of its store workers during 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 lowerwage 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.”

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.

Managers are also taught to get to know their employees and understand their home life.

Walmart was once considered to be a pariah of rural America, vilified by some for wiping out local businesses by selling cheap goods made in China.

Now, Walmart is rebranding itself as a company focused on the needs of its workers and the fate of small towns and hardscrabble cities.

In the past year, Walmart has spent about $650,000 running television ads about Walmart Academy, according to Alphonso, a TV data company. It has spent $17.6 million on an ad highlighting the company’s commitment to buy $250 billion in goods made or grown in America.

“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 employee loyalty and performance, but increasing pay would benefit the workers most.

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

Fulton, a city of about 11,400 people, was once home to a factory that made Nestlé Crunch bars. The company shut the factory and moved operations to Wisconsin in 2003.

Woodward, the mayor, appreciates that the supercenter provides steady jobs during a tough economic time.

But he misses the Nestlé plant.

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

Roger Kisby / New York Times Mac Guile runs the meat department at the Walmart in Fulton, N.Y. Guile, who started at Walmart at 19 as a janitor, says the Walmart Academy taught him how to better motivate his workers.