Later is better than never, right? So here is the summary of the Drupal training and certification at the Szeged 2008 Drupalcon (you can also watch the video of the full session).
The panel gathered together (from right to left):
- Jacob Redding (Rain City Studios)
- Joeri Poesen (Symbiotix)
- Zohar Stolar (Linnovate.net)
- Robert Douglass (Acquia)
- Nate Haug (Lullabot)
What has been discussed?
The first conclusion we had, after presenting each one's training activities, and hearing some more from the public, was that virtually no one actually does Drupal training as a considerable source of income. At least not directly. Whoever does it, does it from one of the following reasons:
- Inside training for the development of internal Drupal capabilities withing an organization
- A side-effect (or bi-product) of the trainer presence, as part of a greater (Drupal) project
- Pure Drupal advocation
- Branding of the trainer as a Drupal expert
- Acquia presents a new reason: certify it's clients to use their Drupal-based product
In his "state of Drupal" presentation Dries raised the question: "How do create an army of a 100,000 Drupal developers?" (page 12). There was quite a consensus, that facilitating Drupal training is good for the future of the project.
We agreed that collaborating over this subject is something everyone will benefit from. The main issues were - What exactly should we share? and How and where do we do it?
What exactly should we share?
Our goal for the first phase, is to create a repository of few different curriculums, upon which one can build his own course and courseware. These curriculums will not be authoritative in any official way (e.g., they are not governed by anyone, including the Drupal association), but they will (hopefully) be used, by the large training facilities. This will have the effect of improving their quality.
For the later phase, Robert presented his vision of a site that uses the wonders of semantic web (i.e. RDF) in order to gather many related resources together, into one site, through which one could build his own curriculum, own course, have them in multiple levels of difficulty, targeted to different audiences etc.... Sounds like a super ambitious project which will make many people happy when it becomes real (that said - the future is already here).
How and where do we do it?
So Robert's idea is one suggestion, but until it is here, we agreed that g.d.o. is:
- Not an ideal infrastructure for sharing our materials. The wiki pages are not good enough. We need a richer, more accurately adapted infrastructure.
- A good place to discuss the best infrastructure for that matter. So... Start discussing!
We should probably continue publishing our training programs, not (only) as publicity, but also their structures, and especially the logic behind this structure. My experience shows that this is not the easiest task (above all if you need to translate the text), but it will pay off, once we have more of those.
Will there be a unified Drupal training / certification?
Probably not. And there shouldn't be one.
We decided that the certification issue is much too big and unclear at the moment, so we didn't cover it during our session.
What's next?
It's up to all of us. The keyword here is "share". The more material we have, the easier it will get for us to understand the best structure of the collaborative training area.
We need ideas about the above mentioned infrastructure, so if you have any experience or insights about it - please share them.
In the meantime, continue to train, gain experience, promote Drupal and best Druapl practices, and come back here to tell everyone about it!