The Drupal Apprenticeship Qualification

Published in 2015

Over the past few years I’ve been working with various members of the Drupal community, under the Open Drupal banner, and with Happy on bringing the industry closer to the education we offer to young people.

We’ve now successfully helped three cohorts of Drupal Apprentices in London gain valuable experience and a qualification (while being paid) and most of them have gone on to full time employment as Drupal developers.

Outdated training in the tech industry is a major issue and we now have the opportunity to help fix that

So far, this has been a fantastic opportunity for both the young people and the employers, but we’ve been working within existing frameworks to deliver the training.

Earlier this month we got the go ahead to create our own Apprenticeship qualification.

This is amazing news! Outdated training in the tech industry is a major issue and we now have the opportunity to help fix that. What’s even more exciting is that we’ll be building the qualification in an entirely open source way.

A New Qualification

Apprenticeship qualifications in the UK are often delivered through frameworks, which can be fairly generic and include units which are not relevant for a job as specific as a Drupal developer. Our new apprenticeship is being created by us - the Drupal industry - so now we can cut out the Microsoft Access training and keep things up to date.

The Open Drupal Curriculum

The materials can be reviewing, collaborated on, edited, versioned and even forked by anyone

We’ve so far been using Google Docs to prototype a curriculum, and now seemed like a great time to move it into a more collaborative environment, so I’ve started porting it over to GitHub using simple markdown files.

An open source curriculum is a very exciting prospect. The materials can be reviewed, collaborated on, edited, versioned and even forked by anyone. We can use all the tools and methods we use to build open source software projects, but for training materials.

We have a lot of ideas of where we could go with the curriculum, both from a presentation and delivery perspective and seeing how it could be picked and used up by others. There has been huge support from the community so far (thanks to everyone who’s helped!).

Most of all though, we need your help! We’ve been given an amazing opportunity here and we can lead the way by making this work. I urge you to head over to GitHub and look through the curriculum, the issue queue and see how you can contribute.