dcsp

Thomas Edison said, "There is far more opportunity than there is ability," which still holds true in many technology sectors today, especially in the Drupal Community. For years we’ve sailed onward with a pretty lean "experienced" talent pool – sometimes overextending ourselves, our employees, and our contractors. We’re good, but we lack numbers. And if we keep on this way, we are not only going to lose market share for Drupal, we’re going to lose talented people to burnout and discontent.

The Drupal community has a problem, or perhaps it's better to say a perception problem. We tend to look at contributions to Drupal through code-tainted glasses. This isn't really all that surprising, seeing how we are an open-source software project. We'd be nothing without the plethora of talented developers who, over the past 12 years, have helped make Drupal one of the top content management systems available today. It's also fair to say that two other types of contributions are well-known: documentation and community organizing. Both play a vital role in the health of our project. Without strong documentation it would be (even more) difficult climb the Drupal learning curve, and without community organizers, I doubt anyone would argue that our growth wouldn't be nearly as fast. But there is another huge contribution that needs to come into view. It's one that I'd argue is equally as important as code, documentation, and community organization if the project is to grow and develop; and that is mentoring. A lack of guidance among newbies is creating longer paths to proficiency, and we are destined to keep struggling with seasoned-talent shortage if we, at least some of us, don't shift our priorities a bit. We've got plenty of awesome code, but it's no small issue that our supply of developers, at the level we are all looking to hire, is becoming a handicap to the development of Drupal. We feel it is so key to Drupal's future, that we've made it an integral part of our 10-week Drupal Career Starter Program. tl;dr version: we're looking for mentors, you should apply.

The beginning of the New Year seems like a good milestone to provide a progress update on the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program Work Experience (WE) Drupal. Eleven DCSP grads are interning with Drupal organizations all over the country, engaging their new-found Drupal knowledge and abilities in a variety of tasks, and gaining critical experience every day. Most of the interns are between one-third and one-half complete with their Work Experience, and reviews are super encouraging. Some amazing organizations from far and wide stepped up to serve as WE Drupal Hosts, and help the eager 11 jumpstart their careeers, including the Drupal Association , Lullabot , WebEnabled , Radiant Blue Technologies , Cloud Nyne , Urban Rethink , Orange County Library System , Proctors , and DrupalEasy. Overall, the feedback from the hosts has been extremely positive, while the general reaction from the interns has been...overwhelming.

The DrupalEasy Career Starter Program (DCSP), a one-of-a-kind 10-week, multi-modal Drupal training program is proud to announce the graduation of all 20 of our students from the class of 2012. This is the second year of the DCSP in Brevard County, Florida and we’re excited to watch this year’s graduates become (even more!) active Drupal community members and developers. Through a grant from Brevard Workforce, the DCSP’s goal was to retrain 20 unemployed IT professionals and turn them into Drupal professionals. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, approximately 8,000 skilled workers lost their jobs at Kennedy Space Center in Brevard County. Our available pool of talented IT professional was HUGE. This year’s DCSP effort received 202 applications for just 20 slots. The vast majority of the students selected had zero Drupal experience coming in. The rest of this post will give you an idea of how much Drupal knowledge and experience they have going out...

Using Git to move the code base of a Drupal site from a local development environment to a hosting provider (or vice-versa) is a necessary skill that most Drupal site builders should have. Configuring and utilizing a remote Git repository can be an especially daunting task for people who don't have a strong background with version control systems.

We're a little over halfway through the second edition of the DrupalEasy Career Starter Program (DCSP) , and in addition to learning the Drupal basics, our twenty students have also been learning how to leverage the various "satellite technologies" in the Drupal universe (Git, IRC, SSH) to interact and contribute to the Drupal community. In case you're not familiar, the DCSP is a 20-week program that is aimed at jumpstarting our students' Drupal careers with 10 weeks of classroom training followed by a paid internship with an organization that uses Drupal. We call it "multi-modal" training because in addition to the classroom training, students are also assigned a community mentor, participate in mandatory lab hours, contribute back to the Drupal community, topped off with real-world experience in the form of an internship with one of our WE Drupal host organizations.

We all want rock stars on our projects. But the reality is, there are more projects out there than there are experienced Drupal developers to handle them. How can we make more rock stars? WE Drupal . Work Experience (WE) Drupal was developed by Brevard Workforce , our super innovative, Drupal-embracing local workforce agency as a follow-on program for the Drupal Career Starter Program to help jumpstart careers for developing Drupal talent in the region. WE Drupal provides DCSP grads with a salary while they work for companies and organizations within the Drupal Community for up to 10 weeks.

The second edition of the Drupal Career Starter Program kicked off last week with 20 out-of-work, eager IT professionals looking to jumpstart a new career in Drupal. They’re looking forward to spending 10 weeks learning the fundamentals of Drupal in the classroom, working their way up the Drupal Ladder during their lab hours, and transitioning into a paid internship with one of our Work Experience (WE) Drupal hosts . As if that wasn’t enough to jump-start a Drupal career, we’ve also matched each student with a DrupalEasy Community Mentor that will help guide the student in their 5 mandatory hours of community contributions each week. 20 students and mentors multiplied by 5 hours per week for 10 weeks equals 1,000 hours of community contributions.

The success of mentor-protégé relationships driving greatness in all kinds of fields stands the test of time, from Socrates and Plato, to Max Plank and Albert Einstein, Emperor Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker (maybe not the best example), and even Dries and Webchick. Philosophy, physics, and even IT are better, and better recognized, because knowledge was shared and ideas were nurtured. There are thousands more examples in hundreds of disciplines. Now is a great time to take a cue from history and apply the mentoring strategy to the Drupal project with a focused effort. DrupalEasy is ramping up our second Drupal Career Starter Program (DCSP) in August, and one of the enhancements to the program this year is that students are required to put in 5 hours of community time at the direction of a mentor. In a few weeks, the 20 eager protegés, vetted for technical ability and attitude, will be ready to devote 5 hours per week to the Drupal project at the direction of 20 DrupalEasy Community Mentors (this is where you come in!)

In part 1 of this post I shared how I got started on the line of thinking that we as a community are planting a lot of seeds, spreading the fertilizer, but not doing much tending to the Talent crops. In the second part of this post, I’ll share just how some of the numbers support the ideas behind why newbie developers are having some issues crossing the gap, or, to go with the opening theme for this second post, blooming...