Guided Drupal Training Anyone?

Hello South African Drupalistas!

Something more of a commercial message than usual from me. Though very much in support of growing the community as always:

Burtronix (the company I work for) and Telamenta (another headline Drupal company in SA) are in the process of putting together some Drupal-related training courses.

Three of the biggest problems we see for the local Drupal community are:

• Not nearly enough people to do all the work. This is not a market in which we compete for work so much as wish for each others' assistance and skilled time. That makes for a great community, but it leans heavily on the higher-skilled individuals' time. With the demand for high-end Drupal websites increasing daily we're not so much in need of more clients as we are of more talent.
• Difficult and slow skills transfer. With the constraints on people's time and the geographically spread-out nature of South African business (we're not in a built-up city, often spending time intermingling as companies and working in co-working areas) we don't see each other often enough for easy skills transfer.
• No clear path to building skills. Especially for new people and those used to formal education who may have the talent, but don't know where to start or feel more comfortable knowing there's structure to their learning experience. We have few options for them to attend courses right now that can assure them of a good return on investment of their time.

We have many courses in mind, but with our own time also at a premium, we're focussed on three to flesh them out in planning and get some community input to see if we're on the right track and if there is enough of a demand.

Courses will be led by very highly talented and skilled Drupal people. All courses will be on week day evenings from 18:30, not Friday (into the weekend) or Wednesday (reserved for Drupal meet-ups)).

Courses

We are setting out to provide the following three courses as follows:

Using Drupal

Is a beginners' course that will most likely follow the excellent Using Drupal book of equivalent Drupal 8 book). The book is included in the course and this will be a guided weekly class following the book through. Every time we have 10-15 people ready to sign up and deposits paid, a new course will start. Since the course will complete when the book is completely covered, the pace will be set by the course' attendees, so some groups may proceed faster through the course than others. We may still have some unforeseen costs to work into the price, but we're most likely looking at a R 3 500 to R 4 000 p.m. price range.

General Front-End

A little tougher than the Using Drupal course, you should already know Drupal site building, this will be a custom course in three parts. It will be twice a week, also with 10-15 people. The first week will cover User Experience, the second User Interface, Design, Mock-ups and Photoshop and the last two weeks will cover HTML, Sass/Compass, Templates, Zen and Basic Responsive work. We're hoping to make this course available for around R 7 000 to R 8 000.

Enterprise Work-flow

Finally, a tough one. Or at least, an advanced one because nothing is tough once you know how. This will cover enterprise workflow for larger-scale websites. Features, git, dev -> stage -> live states of sites and how to move through those states safely. Since this will probably be of use mostly in companies, the course is made available to companies at the R 18 000 to R 20 000 price point, but the company may send up to three people to attend. The idea being that many companies will have higher and lower skilled people to send and that the highly skilled person will be able to learn more and transfer skills to the other people in the company that will then also have a good idea how things will work. This sort of workflow will always have some customised implementation based on a company's infrastructure and existing workflow. This course will be a full week course (five evenings, over two weeks) with perhaps an additional workshop arranged for attendees on the weekend following.

Locations

National

Currently we plan these courses for the Johannesburg area only. We have some plans for the future to make them available in other areas in the country. If you are located too far to attend, let us know where so that we can get some idea of where the demand lies for future options.

Johannesburg

We'd like to offer these initial Johannesburg courses in the same vicinity as the Drupal user-group meet-ups, but we're open to requests to host them in other areas too. An especially useful area may be more central, closer to Johannesburg still just North of it. Your suggestions and request are most welcome and please let us know what would be most convenient to you.

Other Courses

Demand drives supply here. So if you guys have a special interest for which we can put a course together for you. Just say so. Two courses we just barely didn't include were focussed on server infrastructure and more advanced front-end development. Another always mentioned one was for module development. Finally, if you are interested in licenced courses such as ones from Acquia, we can investigate offering these too. They may cost a bit more with licensing fees, so let's just look at demand first.

Feedback

We would like your feedback. Are you interested, or do you know anyone, who would like to participate in one of these courses? Are the courses offered above or below your skill level? Do you see the benefit in attending a lecturer driven course on Drupal?