Teaching Drupal to the local community
For the past 2 years, we've been struggling to find good Drupal talent in Monterrey, Mexico where I live. I currently work at IIIEPE, and we develop about 90% of our web based systems using Drupal (6 and 7), but it's hard to do everything all by myself. But no matter where we look, there's no highly trainned Drupal talent, the one that can start producing from day one. So I got tired of that situation and I decided to get my hands dirty. One of the things that we do at IIIEPE is teaching, and we do teaching to teachers, so we have some really amazing talent that can design courses.
One year ago, I found out about a really cool web agency that had the same problem that we do, so we both decided to create a trainning program and teach not only Drupal, but the whold thing, Linux, Git, AWS and more. After a long year of learning how to document and create a course out of nothing, we started to look for candidates to join. We offer the program almost for free with a few conditions and we went out looking for young talent in local Universities. So far, we've reached more than 400 students and we only have 17 registered so far. Don't get me wrong, there's really good talent out there, really great talent, but aprently, most of them are not interested. So here's what I learned.
- Most students don't know open source. And by that I mean many of them never heard of open source software before, they know Windows, APS.net, Java, C# and all that stuff but most of them never heard of Linux, Git, PHP or MySQL.
- Most of them are not interested in moving away from the Microsoft planet to the Open Source world.
I get that software companies, specially Microsoft, reach out universities and sell their licenses for almost nothing, and they do lobbing to prevent any competitors (a.k.a. Open Source) from entering the University. So schools teach them Windows Server instead of Linux, ASP.net instead of PHP/Ruby/Node.js, and C# instead of C++