Drupal Training & India

I'm going to wholesale copy & paste from an interesting article/interview with Acquia Founder & CTO Dries Buytaert. It is very interesting to me to see how different parts of the world approach training in a new technology. Especially when it directly impacts what I'm doing on a day to day basis here at Acquia.

Drupal and India…

How do you plan to expand your training program in India?

We have already been doing some training in India. One of the reasons for this trip is to understand the state of Drupal in India and what the needs of the community here are. One of the things we have discovered from the interactions we had is the strong desire for training, both from small Drupal shops and the large SIs. Everybody has expressed a desire to get expert training in Drupal. We work with a lot of training partners as well. We have a lot of small Drupal shops. We have found that the demand for trained Drupal professionals does not match the supply at all.

So do you offer a certification course for Drupal?

Right now, we have some full-time staff at Acquia to build and maintain the training curriculum. We provide expert training in all Drupal aspects. We are using that training material and sharing it with all our partners. We are also training the trainers effectively. We help our partners impart that training, because we feel it is more scalable and that’s how we can reach thousands of Drupal people. We do not have any formal certification in place, but I think that it is only a matter of time before either we do that as a company, or someone else from the community does it. At some point of time, the demand for Drupal and its adoption will be so large that this will become a necessity.

So how do you plan to scale up training in India?

If you look at North America and Europe, Drupal basically grew there for two reasons. First, a lot of developers and engineers working for bigger organisations started organising Drupal meetups and camps. That’s one of the things I would want to promote here. One of the main reasons of this trip is that we want to help people organise these camps. We are also trying to take the “top-to-down approach”. We are meeting up with the partners and exploring possibilities as to how can they take it up more effectively. We already have 8-10 stronger partners and we are also working with larger SIs. Some of them are doing architecture work, development work and training. So we already have 2-3 training partners in India.

Have you set any target regarding how many people you plan to train in a given period?

We are here to gauge how big the domain really is. We would like to work with as many Indian partners as possible. Clearly, there is a demand for thousands of trained Drupal professionals. Now we have to see how to cater to that kind of demand. This is the reason why Drupal training in India is so important. The biggest challenge is to find Drupal developers and trained Drupal professionals. This is one of the biggest hindrances for the growth of Drupal adoption in India, so there is a huge opportunity for every engineer in India to get involved in Drupal.