Drupal As Tech Education: Fostering New Staff Via the Drupal Stack
What does a grass-roots generated internship look like in a company dedicated to open source and contribution? Phase2 welcomed thirteen interns to our BuilDesign internship program this year: developers, designers, and the blossoming skills of product management, sales, and project management. For fourteen weeks, they learned together from our best talent, and the results were transformational. We believe in investing in junior talent because:
- As members of the open source community, we believe in contributing to the people who will form the fabric of our industry.
- The process gives us keen insight into the next generation of tech talent and how to find the best of them early.
- Finding talent in the wide variety of agency roles is hard: this helps us identify and guide those aptitudes early on.
- The infusion of new ideas, fresh energy, passion, mentorship, and teaching is immeasurably valuable to our culture - as a company and as an open source community.
Drupal is ideal for the basis of internship learning not because it is easy, but because it is vast and full-featured. To learn to build and develop in Drupal requires understanding and use of languages like PHP, CSS, and Javascript but also technologies at every step of the “webstack”: hosting, version control, deployment, caching, testing. Drupal’s community is also vital for new developers by offering guidance, support, and real humans to interact with while learning such a massive framework.
Attendees of this session will learn from the program founders:
- The business case for junior talent development to your company (and how to pitch it)
- How to find and identify the best, most diverse junior talent
- Our proven playbook for curriculum development
- The benefits to your existing staff: developing a culture of mentorship
- How to start small and plan big for junior talent development