Corporate Training Magazine

The Home Depot: Building Knowledge Through e-Learning
Vol 1 Issue 1 - Sept 2005

By Kevin S. Liskowich

The Home Depot has grown to become the world's second-largest retailer by giving their customers the tools and building blocks they need to succeed. And the company has built its own success on a solid foundation of learning.

"Knowledgeable associates are the primary contributors to customer satisfaction and company success," reported Leslie Joyce, vice-president and chief learning officer at The Home Depot.

To reach its customer service goals, The Home Depot has made a significant commitment to employee training and development, providing 23 million hours of product and service training to assist its sales associates in their development. In addition, the company delivered approximately 2.5 million hours of retail leadership training in 2004, and they project this number will continue to grow.

The Home Depot uses a variety of traditional training methods, including instructor-led classroom sessions. But with more than 1,900 stores and approximately 325,000 associates in the US, Canada and Mexico, traditional training methods can pose challenges.

One of these challenges is time. With so many locations across North America, if a dozen trainers were sent to different stores each week, it would take them more than two years to complete the training. Logistics also becomes an issue because it's not possible to train everyone simultaneously. Instead, employees would have to attend classes in shifts, lengthening the time for all associates to attend the courses.

Cost is another factor, both from a travel and instruction perspective. Instructor-led training would require sending someone to each location across North America. And if only one or a few new employees are in need of training, the relative cost is further magnified.

"Convenience, consistency, accessibility and confidence that learning has occurred also play a major role. Lastly, the speed with which we can distribute key product learning, especially for new products, is essential to driving sales early in a product's lifecycle," stated Joyce.

E-learning at The Home Depot is primarily used in product, process and procedure knowledge transfer that is applicable to a large number of associates. The primary benefits are ease of deployment and associate access.

Joyce explained, "The learning can be scheduled to meet any store's operations timeline, and it can be made available to the associates when it works best for them. They can take the courses at their own pace and at a time that fits their schedule, so it's associate-friendly. It also ensures that we can distribute certain kinds of learning to our associates very quickly and monitor the direct impact the learning has on sales."

Additionally, the range of multimedia tools and components available through e-learning allows the company to engage their associates in an interactive learning experience. "E-learning helps us create realistic and interactive 3D learning environments that enable learners to select a product, review its features and benefits, make a recommendation to the 'customer', and receive adaptive feedback on their selection," said Joyce.

The above screen shots from PK Basics Plumbing, a one-hour class for new associates that won the Brandon Hall Gold Award for Excellence in e-Learning in 2001, illustrate the environment The Home Depot has created to effectively transfer knowledge of hands-on products and services in an electronic setting. The course design includes detailed visual representations of actual products and procedures. It also incorporates ongoing testing to ensure knowledge transfer.

And training isn't limited to floor staff. "Much of the same processes are used for management training. In addition, we have a very strong commitment to on-the-job experience, to lead as Teacher/Coach and to strategically align action learning. In the recent past, we have been investing heavily in highly interactive, large-scale learning events, and we have found them to be incredibly effective for both learning and engagement," reported Joyce.

While the company realized extraordinary benefits with their e-learning initiatives and was successful in moving parts of employee training to electronic format, they also recognized that certain content was more appropriate for face-to-face instruction.

Joyce explained, "The Home Depot is committed to blended learning solutions through a combination of e-learning and other more traditional learning methods, such as instructor-led classroom programs and on-the-floor mentoring. The variety of our teaching methods helps us to ensure that we have the most effective learning solution possible. The key is making sure we know the vehicle that will resonate the most with our associates."

Commitment to training has also served The Home Depot well in terms of employee morale and retention.

Stated Joyce, "We understand that our associates are our greatest competitive advantage. We have seen that (they) are eager to absorb as much information as possible, and we continue to build programming that provides them with the proper information that will make them successful in their roles."