I kinda do and kinda don't have a home lab.
I have Virtual Box as well as I use Vagrant. Most of my stuff these days are web/dev related so the extent of my home stuff is little more than web servers. I fire up a VM to play with Node or PHP7 or whatever.
I don't know if this qualifies as a "home lab" as I consider it just basic dev tools. I also toy with VMs from VULTR and Digital Ocean.
When it comes to education I have two general ideas. One is that if I need to learn things very specific to tasks my boss is telling me I must cover, I expect the business to help with training. I expect them to let me take an online course or two, buy a book, or buy a service and that I can study as I go and learn "on the job".
If they want me to do new things and learn new things that were never on my job app, then it makes sense they help cover some education for it.
I also like this because I can learn the thing while actually using company data. That is to say, rather than being in a generic lab trying to learn, I can do it with real world data and problems, which is much more useful.
On the other hand, if I want to learn something new, or something to improve myself in a general sense that isn't related to tasks at work, then of course I study on my own.
My problem with the home lab idea is that it's not easy to build the environment I want to study. It's not that easy to build a home lab for studying Cisco edge routing and advanced networking. There are some virtual environments and stuff but I can't afford hundreds and even thousands of dollars worth of switches and routers to play with for a home lab. It's harder to study those than it is to, say, spin up a FreeNAS server or OwnCloud.
Personally I don't like the idea of being weeded out based on this. I would think that personal qualities come first, experience second, and passion third.
It's getting harder and harder to find good people. I think people are becoming more selfish and self-serving, with growing animosity toward "the man" and the corporate overlords. You know, those people who make all the money and drive Cadillacs while paying minimal to the techs who actually run the business and keep things flowing. People think businesses are just out to use them.
The point being that I would much rather hire a person because they are trustworthy and dedicated and love the work and are a decent person. Ruling out selfish, self-absorbed, arrogant, job-hopping, money-focused, disconnected people. I don't give a crap if they have a home lab if they are only in it for the money. They will jump ship at the next highest offer and play that game. I wouldn't want to hire somebody who is already a disgruntled employee from day 1 for no other reason than he hates having to work for someone.
Once I've found somebody who seems to be excited to work at the company and knows something about it, who proves to be a decent human being and isn't simply job-hopping up the "ladder", then I'd move on to knowledge/experience.
If they prove to be good and experienced at the core aspects of the job, I can always train for the rest and negotiate salary based on their experience and how much I think I need to train them for the position.
Where I work now we've seen 15 people hired and fired in a little over a year in basic positions. Mostly they quit or were fired because they were not good people. Whiners, complainers, back biters, lazy, job hopping. Who cares if they had a home lab? They were not good people, they didn't work well with others, they were lazy and didn't want to learn anything new or take on any tasks outside their small sphere. They were jealous of whatever pleasures the CEO had and thus built up animosity toward the company.
Find good people first. Train them. Keep them when you got them!
