Drupal Career Online Graduates Five With Updated Curriculum

A few days ago, we graduated yet another class of students from our 12-week [Drupal Career Online](http://drupaleasy.com/dco) training program. This was the seventh session of our unique Drupal training program (not to mention the two most recent [Acquia U](https://u.acquia.com) classes) and - like Drupal - we're constantly evolving. This session brought the most significant changes to the curriculum since we've started - integrating some Drupal 8 content as well as a re-structuring of the schedule to put more of an emphasis on development workflows and tools.

This session's class was comprised of five students - four of whom are existing full-time employees of organizations using Drupal. The students had a wide range of experience, but all had a desire to learn best practices and the skills necessary to extend and maintain modern Drupal sites. We met in a virtual classroom three times a week for the duration of the 12-week program to learn new skills, work on in-class exercises, review homework, and discuss issues that the students experienced with both class exercises and real-world Drupal projects.

This session's graduating class includes:

• Sara Cartee-Kennedy (scatky)
• Marvin Crippen (mcrip-uw)
• Rafael Medina (rafamew)
• Daniel Rose (Daniel_Rose)
• Carla Stoner (cstoner)

As part of their training, they've been given a healthy dose of community involvement, including the importance of using IRC, attending Drupal events, and participating in the community. As you see these folks around, please give them a nice welcome!

From the very beginning of the Drupal Career Online program in 2011 (then called the "Drupal Career Starter Program") our goal has been to provide professional long-form Drupal training focusing on best practices, community involvement, and sustainable site building. To this end, we're constantly improving and expanding the curriculum. Currently, students are provided with PDF lessons, screencasts, online assessments, all in addition to the 7 hours of live, instructor-led training that are provided each week.

With the recent release of Drupal 8, it was time to re-think our curriculum and begin making some wide-ranging changes. In addition to adding Drupal 8 to a number of various site-building lessons and exercises, we made a rather large structural change to the overall curriculum to put more of an emphasis on comment development workflows. This change was based on feedback from both graduates and employers. For example, in the past we had separate lessons for Drush, Git, and working with remote servers. The curriculum now begins with basic Drush and Git commands and continuously expands on them throughout the 12 weeks.

The goal is to get students into the habit of using Drush and Git as they work on the various parts of a site. As the course progresses, we introduce the concepts of remote repositories (utilizing the GitHub, WebEnabled, Pantheon, and Acquia platforms) as well as remote development, testing/staging, and production/live environments. The overall goal being preparing graduates to be able to be revenue-generating members of their organization from day 1.

We're extremely proud of all our graduates and know that we couldn't do it without the help of our volunteer community mentors and Work Experience Drupal partners. Our next session begins in early March, 2016.