In an interview with TechRepublic, Dries Buytaeart said, "In some ways Drupal is a victim of its own success with demand for Drupal experts to build and support sites using the CMS currently outstripping supply. The biggest challenge that we have right now is scaling. The demand for Drupal is so high that we need more Drupal experts in the world."

As someone who manages and trains Drupal developers, I've been thinking why, with the current job shortage in the United States and abroad, the popularity of IT careers, and a good supply of Drupal training,  how we could have such a shortage? We as a community continually feel an ongoing lack of seasoned experts, and it is, by some accounts hurting the growth and development of the Drupal project. So what exactly is the issue that we as a community can identify?  And what can we do to improve things now so that the shortage is not an ongoing theme in the future of Drupal?  

So my thoughts turned into inspiration, which led to some research and a few ideas I thought I would share, along with a bit of a call to action.

I’ve divided this blog post into a two-part series that covers what prompted this line of thinking, how and where I went for a few answers and perspective, and how we can perhaps harness the power of the Drupal Community to help solve the issues.

Since these posts may a bit of a long read, I figured I’d start off a tl;dr version; the Drupal community is doing a great job of ramping up training programs for people interested in learning Drupal, but experience with a group of interns, some digging online, and a quick survey to test my perceptions demonstrates that there’s clearly more work to be done with junior developer programs to provide valuable (and often necessary) work experience to get people up to the  experienced developers level.  

My First A-Ha Moment

As part of the Drupal Career Starter Program (DCSP), we took 18 skilled IT workers and spent 10 weeks (7 hours/week) teaching them the basics of Drupal site building. At the conclusion of the workshop session, we placed 15 of the students in internships with Drupal-related organizations around the country.

Now that some of the internships are coming to an end, we're seeing that a very small percentage of the interns are being offered full-time work by the organization that they interned with, and we're asking ourselves why. I believe that part of the issue was due to some lessons we learned since this was our first long-term training course, but it was also our first aha-moment that there’s is an important issue in the Drupal community that needs to be addressed: transitioning new developers to experienced developers.

Our 18 students were all recently laid-off workers from Kennedy Space Center. With the retirement of the space shuttle fleet, over 7,000 workers lost their jobs. A significant percentage of those were skilled IT workers, proficient in various platforms and languages, but very few of them with any working knowledge of Drupal or PHP. Through an application process, we selected 18 students (from 70 applicants).

As this was our first attempt at the DCSP, we were bound to make some mistakes - it is now our job to learn from them. Part of that learning process is to share our experience with the community. Clearly, we need to do better in a few key areas:

1. Provide additional instruction on using version control systems (and how to utilize them to get a local version of a Drupal site up-and-running on a local machine under a variety of circumstances).  
2. Provide additional instruction on using Drush.  
3. Provide potential intern employers with additional structure and information about what would make for a good intern experience.  

I could also add that we trusted the Microsoft Windows environment too much, as we were witness to numerous (seemingly random) issues in getting local sites up-and-running and behaving. Of our 18 students, 17 were on Windows, and much classroom and internship time was spent dealing with all the issues (I've since discovered Drupal Quickstart and am falling in love...)

All of these items are fixable by us and will be addressed in future editions of the DCSP.

Experience Gap

The other issue is that the Drupal community has what I’m calling the "experience gap", where newly trained, but unexperienced developers are often left to fend for themselves.

Back in 2007, Dries Buytaert posted his take on the Drupal learning curve. This graphic has been referred to by many people in the Drupal community over the years since it was posted, so I'm going to borrow it to demonstrate my point.

Developers new to Drupal want to get to the "I kick ass" threshold. Once there, I'm assuming it is safe to say that these people can be considered experienced developers. For many new Drupal developers, the first step along the path is some sort of training. Whether it is self-taught, a <shamelessplug>commercial workshop</shamelessplug> (there are currently 12 commercial Drupal workshops listed on http://training.acquia.com/events alone), peer-based learning through meetups and camps, or any other form of training, more often than not, this is the beginning of the path. Let's call anyone at this beginning point "students".

I'm guessing that for the vast majority of new Drupal developers, the time they spend on the "student" portion of the path is self-financed. Granted, there are some organizations that will pay developers to learn Drupal, but I'm assuming it's a small percentage, but I don’t have any hard facts to base this one, so let me know how wrong (or right) I am in the comments below.

Tomorrow I’ll publish part two of this post with some insight that came out of Drupal jobs research, conclusions that came out of survey responses, as well as a few ideas on how we can all help close the gap.

If you're heading to DrupalCon Denver, there will be a Drupal Workforce Development Programs BoF at 1pm Wednesday. 

Thanks to the following people for reviewing and providing input to this article: Ryan Price, Andrew Riley, Heather James, Jacob Singh, Chris Shattuck, Erich Ludwig, Don Vandemark, and Dave Terry.

"Mind the Gap" image from Pommiebastards http://www.flickr.com/photos/pommiebastards/4061144276/

There’s a full house on the podcast this week as Andrew, Ryan, and Mike are joined by Dave Terry (Mediacurrent), John Hannah (Friendly Machine), and Glenn Hilton (ImageX Media) to discuss the Drupal community’s less-than-stellar effort of marketing our beloved software to people outside the community. Both Dave and John have written thought-provoking blog posts on this topic in the past few months while Glenn has been a leader in organizing and evangelizing Drupal business summits. We also managed to discuss the Drupal Association’s recent at-large elections, Coworking Fridays, Acquia’s recent code contributions, recent usability studies, as well as our picks of the week!

Five Stories

1. The Marketing of Drupal - Dave Terry’s A Drupal Crisis Point: Losing the Marketing War, John Hannah’s The Marketing of Drupal, DrupalSummit.com
2. First-ever community-elected Board Members announced by the Drupal Association 
3. Drupal Coworking Friday Followup 
4. Drupal Gardens adds content access control, image tools, bulk operations, and more!
5. Drupal Usability Study

Picks of the Week

• Mike - Module (and theme) Roulette by Dave Reid (Dave Reid on drupal.org) - randomly adds modules and themes to your site.
• Andrew - Commerce Product Bundle by Thomas Hunziker (Hunziker on drupal.org) allows Drupal Commerce products to actually be the product of multiple products.
• Ryan - Accepted Limits by Victor Kareh (vkareh on drupal.org) - allows you to set accepted limits for CCK number fields with custom validation messages, but the form still validates.

Sponsor

WebEnabled.com

Site of the Week

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If you'd like your site highlighted, please submit it at http://DrupalEasy.com/siteoftheweek.

Listener Homework

Fact-check Ryan and Andrew’s explanation of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha.

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Prolific Drupal contributor Dave Reid joins Ryan Price and Mike Anello on the first DrupalEasy podcast of 2012. They discuss the Meta Tags module (and why it’s not just for SEO anymore), Drupal’s security team, Drupal 8’s WSCCI initiative, the increasing complexity of Drupal’s code and the decreasing number of core contributors.