Ticket #13678 (new PLIP)

Opened 3 years ago

Last modified 2 years ago

Training certificate for Plone

Reported by: tom_gross Owned by:
Priority: minor Milestone: 5.0
Component: General Version:
Keywords: Cc:

Description

At the moment I am facing a lot of interest in Plone. People want to know about the CMS and they want trainings. And seriously I don't know if there are any opportunities to get Plone education with a certificate. I know there are companies which do Plone development and hosting but I don't know of an official training program. Some of the development companies seem to offer trainings but they seem to aim at newbies mainly. I guess the only thing at the moment is to go the long path yourself and collect tutorials and videos all over the web and/or wait for the Plone conference to come and visit a training there. But not everyone can or wants to go the way to Plone alone. Some may want professional assistance.

I guess a new major version of Plone is a good chance to introduce a certificate program for trainings. There should be programs for

  • editors,
  • integrators, and
  • developers.

Something a local provider can build upon. I guess this could increase the visibility of Plone greatly.

Change History

comment:1 Changed 3 years ago by tom_gross

  • Component changed from Unknown to General
  • Version 4.4 deleted
  • Type changed from Bug to PLIP
  • Milestone changed from 4.x to 5.0

comment:2 Changed 3 years ago by pigeonflight

comment:3 follow-up: ↓ 4 Changed 3 years ago by davisagli

Sounds like a useful idea. Who is going to make this happen?

comment:4 in reply to: ↑ 3 Changed 2 years ago by pigeonflight

Replying to davisagli:

Sounds like a useful idea. Who is going to make this happen?

I'd like to take this PLIP. I have some ideas about implementing training, plus it will force me to get a better grasp of the Plone 5 stack.

comment:5 Changed 2 years ago by tkimnguyen

I myself do not seek out certificates, and I've been leery of people and organizations that place much importance on certificates. "Plone" is a huge body of knowledge, and we have awesome trainers covering Dexterity, Diazo, theming in general, master classes for admins and devs, bootcamps. "Plone" is also an evolving body of knowledge. Would setting up and maintaining the currency of a certificate program help or detract from the work trainers already do? I'd like to see those recognized trainers chime in. I understand the marketing aspects of providing standardized training programs among a certain class of conusmers.

comment:6 Changed 2 years ago by tkimnguyen

At UW Oshkosh we have set up classes for Plone basics, forms, workflow design, and we are putting together a class for site owners and admins. Our goal is to get everyone into seats so the knowledge gets out and is applied. For the lead up to the Plone Symposium Midwest, our Continuing Education department asked if we would provide certificates for the Plone 101 class we and Six Feet Up put together. We chose not to pursue that.

comment:7 Changed 2 years ago by tkimnguyen

see  http://uwosh.edu/training for Plone manuals and handouts (written in house by our Michelle Loker), video recordings of her basics and forms classes.

comment:8 Changed 2 years ago by pigeonflight

To me the certification is secondary to the standardization.

Here are my first two reasons why certification would be valuable (I'll add more comes to mind).

  • a way for those learning Plone to benchmark their skills
  • a way for organizations to quickly determine if a candidate has a minimum baseline (smart employers will have other ways to filter candidates, but think of this as a big help to the HR department of larger organizations)

I've thought of a "community certification" process where you get certified within local Plone user groups by demonstrating experience and skills.

Last edited 2 years ago by pigeonflight (previous) (diff)

comment:9 Changed 2 years ago by cewing

The idea of establishing a curriculum that covers the skills needed to become a productive Plone developer/integrator is a good one. I think building a community-controlled curriculum with tutorial exercises and slide decks would be very helpful in expanding access to Plone training. Whether a certificate goes with it or not, such training helps to create a common set of understood skills and a common language with which to talk about Plone development. I think the great strength of the Plone Bootcamps Joel Burton used to do was that it produced a large number of folks who all had the same ideas about what was the best way to solve a set of problems. Lacking that common core for training has been detrimental to our community, in my opinion.

I've been working for the last year on establishing a CC licensed curriculum for teaching Python web development, and the toolset and approach I am using could be a useful model. You can find the curriculum in my github account ( https://github.com/cewing/training.python_web)

Anyway, I say go for it.

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