Home Depot CIO promotes in-house tech boot camp

George Boone, senior manager at OrangeMethod, said the company’s first tech boot camp in 2017 was a 12-week course for tech-oriented employees who upgraded their skills.

“Over time, we realized, hey, we have 40,000 people at this company, and a lot of them may want to be software engineers, but they’re hidden behind titles that won’t allow it,” Boone said. “Digital transformation discounts the human element of humans driving change. You have to keep up with technology, but you also have to move people along with it.”

For Home Depot, the program has been the proverbial win-win.

“They are bringing us more value than we are to them, because they are in the stores, they know the customer pain points and they know our systems,” Boone said. “When you add someone like that to a product team, it’s an immediate win.”

The latest iteration of the tech boot camp is a 16-week course that employees can use to become UX managers or software engineers. There are also follow-up recaps and courses on more specific topics.

Lastly, one of the key factors to the program’s success has been the involvement of the HR department.

“We are changing people’s lives, but we wouldn’t have been successful without the partnership with HR,” Boone said.