Towards building a standardized curriculum for Drupal Developers
As one of the largest exclusive Drupal agencies in India and having trained close to 200 employees over its 10 year history we are probably one of the very few Drupal firms in India in a position to take this effort that could in turn help a lot of other Drupal companies. We are looking to compile and publish our Drupal Training Curriculum in an effort to come up with a standard approach towards training developers in Drupal companies. We are looking to complete this exercise by March 31, 2016 and will be publishing the learning objectives, syllabus and curriculum under GFDL license.
We have been working with Drupal since 2006 and have worked with Drupal versions all the way from Drupal 4.7. Through the process of training all our employees over these years we have built a reasonably mature training program. We have a dedicated training team in place to do training throughout the year. We have grown into one of the largest Drupal companies based out of India and we are looking to become the largest Drupal company in India by the end of the coming financial year (2016-17). We are hoping to hire and train around 200 developers by Mar 2017 and towards this we are looking to fine tune our Drupal training program to be able to speed up our training process and make it less people dependent. We believe that it would benefit the Drupal community at large and also other Drupal companies, if we release all our Drupal training materials under the GFDL license.
Our standard training program for developers with PHP background involves a one month in-class training for Drupal along with introduction to our development processes and practices. The in-class training also includes hands-on Drupal programming exercises which the developers are expected to complete along with the classroom sessions. Along with the lectures we also have the developers watch training videos provided by buildamodule.com. There are also tests that the developers have to take before they come out of the training. After the one month in-class training, new developers are assigned to experienced Drupal developers who act as mentors to these new recruits as they continue to learn their way around Drupal while working on real world projects. By working with different types of Drupal projects, a new developer is expected to build good exposure to the different areas of Drupal and the different contributed modules in a year's time.
We are looking to document all the processes and compile all the training content which have been managed by our senior team members over these years into formal documented content ready to be used by more trainers and new recruits. We aim to come up with the following by Mar 31, 2016.
- Drupal Training Syllabus
- Learning objectives for the training program
- Expectations on the areas the developer has to learn across the year
- Training materials for in-class training
- Drupal exercises for the in-class training
- Questions for the weekly tests for the first month
- Questions for the monthly tests for the first three months
- Questions for the quarterly tests for the first year
Interesting in collaborating with us on this project?
We are also looking to set up a question bank with objective type questions to evaluate and monitor the progress of the developers and also the effectiveness of both the in-class as well as on-the-job training that the developer gets in the company. We will be publishing and sharing the materials that we develop, on the groups.drupal.org wiki under the open curriculum project and we are hoping to collect inputs from the Drupal community in the process. We are also hoping that the Drupal community will join us in this exercise both in the process of initial documentation as well as in ongoing fine tuning. We will be publishing regular updates on our site under the Teaching Drupal tag and also sharing content in the Drupal.org group on Drupal Curriculum and Training.
Join the discussion at groups.drupal.org
