Magento Association Pillar No. Two: Education & Training
The Magento Association (MA) has developed four pillars to represent the lenses through which we view every opportunity and decision that comes before the Board of Directors. In a world of infinite possibilities as to how we serve our diverse, global community, the pillars help us determine what we will spend our finite resources on as we pursue our mission to advance and empower the global Magento community and commerce ecosystem through open collaboration, education, and thought leadership.
Today, I'll be discussing the details of our second pillar: education & training. Our current efforts around education and training are centered around a plan to help create trained Magento developers. We're targeting entry-level PHP developers (primarily people who recently completed a PHP "bootcamp" program) who may not be aware of Magento and aren't yet connected to an agency or merchant. MA will provide a training roadmap for those individuals to help them understand what training programs and courses they need to complete so that they are ready to work on a Magento project for an agency, merchant, or technology provider. At the completion of the roadmap, MA will supply these newly trained developers with an "MA Ready" digital badge that will allow hiring managers to quickly identify new developers in the hiring process so that will be able to quickly become productive employees.
An MA committee or task force will build this training roadmap, however, the training itself will come from existing Magento ecosystem training options — i.e., training programs provided by community members, Adobe, and others. Our role in this process will be building a coherent training roadmap and then supplying a process by which developers can submit proof that they have completed the roadmap successfully to receive their badge.
In addition to the training courses that will be required as part of this roadmap, we will be including a requirement around the Magento Open Source project — most likely this will be a requirement that these new developers have an accepted pull request into some aspect of the Magento Open Source ecosystem. This requirement serves two purposes:
- First and foremost, the requirement will encourage a new generation of developers to have the community and open source ethos that has been such an important part of Magento's growth over the past decade.
- Second, the requirement allows MA to demonstrate to Adobe a direct impact that MA membership has on the open source codebase.
After we successfully implement this training roadmap for developers, we'd like to expand it to other roles in the future, such as project managers, architects, etc. Another potential future project that might be tied into this or run separately would be a program to help Magento merchants better understand and utilize the Magento platform.
For more on the Magento Association's four pillars, click here.
