Drupal Apprenticeship Mentoring

One of the community projects I am involved in is the Drupal Apprenticeship scheme. This is a scheme whereby we find young people who might lack the means to a university education but can display and aptitude for web development and we place them in apprenticeship positions in companies who use Drupal on a day to day basis. These could be in house or part of an agency or dedicated development team.

Before they go to their placement in a company we give them two weeks of Drupal training in site building and code basics - this way they are significantly less of a potential burden to the workforce or team that take them on. They are also skilled enough to build their own simple Drupal sites. We have outlined a basic lesson plan comprising of tutorials to create a basic blog site for themselves and then some more in depth learning followed by some project work based on simplified versions of real world website projects.

In the first week they create their own blogging site from scratch - this then acts as their record of progress through the pre-apprenticeship training and throughout their work placement. This group also created a project site to further show off their skills and some even got on to creating their first module!

Mentoring

During this first two weeks of pre-apprenticeship training volunteers from the Drupal community drop in for a day or so to assist the trainers by being available to answer questions from the apprentices about the lessons or projects they are working on. Some mentors also prepare short presentations on simple Drupal specifics such as taxonomy, content types, views, blocks…

The apprentices also gain a great deal by asking mentors questions about their jobs and careers, having tours of sites that we have built or are building now. A look into how big and clever a Drupal site can be - this time around I gave a talk on UX, explaining the importance of user experience in teh design and development process - I used their own blog sites as examples and we discussed the personas who may be looking at these sites and what they might want to do ~ or more importantly what we would want them to do. Then we had a critical look at the sites they had build, analysing them for calls to action and paths to GOALS.

London October 2014

Curve have been really supportive of the project and I have just spent the best part of last week down in London mentoring the new recruits through this two week ‘boot camp’ of Drupal training.

It has been a great success, all of the guys completed the course, two already had placements when I left on Friday and I heard one more at least was placed earlier this week. If you would like to interview or place one of the remaining apprentices please get in touch with Sheena Smith:

Amazing week...potential apprentices learning #drupal and making great progress. Thanks to everyone supporting them x pic.twitter.com/kFymvFKe9F

— Sheena Morris (@happyapprents) October 24, 2014

For more information on the scheme and future Dupal apprentices please see our dedicated site, our Google+ Community or the Group on Drupal.org.

The Future

We are hoping to extend the apprenticeships in 2015 and beyond, we’ll be looking to set up a steering group, make it more focussed on Drupal 8, add more to the pre-apprenticeship training, distribute the scheme more widely across the UK and also promote the opportunities available to schools and colleges and specifically to girls.

If you would like to be a part of this please get in touch - you can email me through curve or find me on Twitter or Google +.

We're looking for London based #Drupal firms who might consider taking on an apprentice interested? https://t.co/9VNbpjXPJM (please ReTweet)

— Crispin Read (@crispin_read) October 9, 2014