dco

The fifth class of our Drupal career training program is just about at the halfway mark, and our students are eager to put their new skills to work. The six Drupal Career Online students will be ready for junior-developer-level work in mid-November, and we're looking for forward-thinking organizations willing to help our graduates on the next leg of their Drupal career journey. As we've done for the past five classes, (we've had more than 60 graduates so far) we're looking to make introductions between our upcoming graduates and organizations looking for people with Drupal site-building and development skills. Our Work Experience Drupal (WE Drupal) program is designed to provide students with valuble experience in internship-type settings. WE Drupal host companies are asked to make a 6-10 week commitment to one or more of our students, provide them with guidance, mentoring, and the professional experience that is so difficult to come by for new Drupal site builders and developers. In return, you get the efforts of a well-prepared, super-eager Drupal novice to help you lighten the task-load for your staff.

Since we started our long-form Drupal Career Starter Program in 2011, we've always struggled a bit trying to find a single local Apache-MySql-PHP stack that is powerful enough for day-to-day Drupal development, easy to set up, and that works for a wide range of people new to local web development. We're always on the lookout for a local Drupal development stack that will help to reinforce the lessons and best practices that we strive to instill in all of our students. It's pointless to teach students methods and processes that aren't typically found in the community, so being able to bring students up-to-speed as quickly as possible with things like Drush, Git, and commonly-used workflows is of the utmost importance. Generally, we've stuck with a combination of Acquia Dev Desktop (version 1), Uniform Server, and DrupalPro, depending on each student's skill level and previous experience. Until recently, we've always had more Windows users than Mac or Linux users (combined!), and usually didn't run into any problems until we introduced Drush, Git, and other Linux-y command line tools, at which point Mac and Linux users spent a lot of time attempting to help Windows users get Drush installed. When Acquia Dev Desktop 2 was made available, the list of features definitely piqued our interest. Integration with Acquia Cloud is nice (similar to what Kalabox does for Pantheon), but what we were really excited about was the Drush integration. Since we are using Acquia Dev Desktop 2 for the first time with our 2014 Fall Drupal Career Online program, we thought it would make sense to run through the pros and cons from a training perspective.

What do you get when you combine a state-of-the-art open source content management system with a seemingly endless need for developers, an instructor passionate about developing Drupal talent with solid fundamentals and best practices (yours truly), six eager, geographically diverse students (pictured above - more on them in future blog posts), and a modern online classroom environment (the topic of this post)? If the content management system is Drupal, then the only answer is the online version of the Drupal Career Starter Program: Drupal Career Online. This week marks the start of the first session of Drupal Career Online, an immersive 12-week online training program designed to take people passionate about technology and turn them into Drupal professionals. The curriculum is the result of continuous development and improvement over the past three years, and now features a dedicated web site, PDF handouts and reference documents for every lesson, weekly self-assessment quizzes, screencasts covering important concepts and a healthy dose of Drupal community involvement.

With four sessions graduating more than 60 People over the past four years, there's no doubt that the Drupal Career Starter Program can bring aspiring developers from zero to hero in just a matter of a few months. Imagine what it can do for you, or your people, who are already developers, but need to be trained up in Drupal. We have, and are making it highly accessible in a live, online format designed to fit into working schedules. The upcoming Drupal Career Online training program kicks off in just about a month, and your organization now has the ability to choose the developer(s) that match well to your team and leverage our unique, holistic training to turn them into a solid member of your Drupal development team.