Thanks to everyone who made it to the OpenDrupal Hack Day on Saturday! It was a very thought provoking day of discussions, planning and getting things written down.
We had some great discussions around the motivations of companies to take on an intern or apprentice, and what would be most useful to them, and most tangible for us to achieve.
We came to the conclusions that:
- Companies want new, high quality staff members, and if they can pay them at a (relatively) low rate - that's a bonus
- Companies who want to take on someone to train fully want someone who already knows enough to be useful
- They are happy to invest the time into training the right person who will become a permanent member of their team - but they have finite resources
- Knowing some metrics around likely training time is useful
We also talked more about the reasons behind OpenDrupal, which include:
- It can be difficult to get trained up in Drupal and start a career quickly
- Many people who might be interested in becoming a web developer, probably won't know what 'Drupal' is, so advertising cool things you can do with Drupal, rather than the technical side, would hopefully attract a wider audience
- So we can scale, producing something replicable and able to be modified and updated easily is essential
We decided that we think we should create a set of materials which can be gone through in a two week period and act as a Drupal foundation course. We'll focus on the participants getting things done and making achievements, such as building their own website, rather than going into the theory too much. The course will also be able to be taught in a group-based self-learning environment, with mentors available to ask questions to.
Following this, material for a full 1 year apprenticeship would seem to make the most sense, but we'll focus on building the foundation course first
Have I missed anything?
And what do you think? What would be most useful to your company if you took on an apprentice?