 Hey everybody, I am Gwendolyn Inelio, your host. I'm with Drupal Easy Academy in Cocoa, Florida. And we're really happy that you're here to join us for Drupal Career Trailhead, and we're super excited that you are going to get the benefit of the expertise and insight of this amazing panel of Drupal people. So if you're wondering how to build a Drupal career, map out a new path, or even if you're wondering if Drupal is the right career for you, hopefully this session's gonna give you some next steps by the time we're done. Our company is a training and consulting firm, but what we're most proud of is a 12-week Drupal Career starter program, which past muster to earn State of Florida Department of Education license, and which has guided dozens of people on a fast track to a Drupal career. We also just secured a license for our live online version of the program, which means the reach of our Drupal Easy training is now going worldwide, and we're super psyched about that, almost as psyched as we are about today. As our career programs have developed, over the past four years, so have key relationships with amazing people in companies who, although they're not focused on Drupal talent development, they've really stepped up to help us with our mission to do that by offering mentorships, internships, and referrals for our graduates. This form represents a few of those companies, and it's clear that they don't make it a secret that they wanna build the Drupal CMS through excellent talent development, and that's why we're all here today, and we thank all you guys for joining Drupal Easy here today. So what we're gonna do today is start out with a C-level perspective on opportunities in Drupal and lead into a few living case studies that represent how different people with different starting points and experiences get to their success. From there, we're gonna give you insight on finding your way no matter what your background is and finish up with a panel of recruiters who represent four different companies from three continents who will tell you what they're looking for. We, of course, are gonna leave plenty of time for questions. So Nancy Stango is going to lead us off today with a Drupal Jobs landscape. Her impressive 20 years of technology, design, development, and marketing has brought her here as the founder and CEO of New Jersey-based Blink Reaction. She and her team's primary mission at DrupalCon is to recruit for dozens of positions. She launched Blink in 2006 with one employee building small business websites. Today, Blink delivers enterprise-scale websites to Fortune 100 clients with teams throughout the U.S., Europe, and South America using Drupal exclusively. Please help me welcome Nancy Stango who will share her perspectives on the Drupal Jobs landscape. Easy folks for putting this together today and giving all of us and myself the opportunity to talk about something that we're all very excited about, which is successful Drupal careers. We at Blink spend quite a bit of our energy and focus, as you'll see why in a little while, thinking about Drupal careers and how to bring people on board successfully. Show of hands, who here is looking for their first Drupal job? And not too many, actually. So others of you looking for new Drupal opportunities? Show of hands? Well, great. This is the place. We're gonna talk a little bit about what the landscape of that looks like in the next 15 or 20 minutes and put some perspective on why you want a Drupal job. Not just today, but what is a Drupal job going to that you take today gonna mean for you tomorrow and even 10 years from now. And making those right decisions today. And I'll take a couple of minutes just to talk about a few tips, which I know our panelists will continue on more later. But first, a warning. I don't know if you guys have seen the Blink shirts. On the back of our shirts, it says resistance is futile. Everybody blinks. What we mean by that is that really Drupal is a really strong force and it's growing fast. And we all love what we do and love is growing part of it. So how fast is Blink growing? How fast is Drupal growing? Here's a picture of the job growth at Blink. I like to share a little bit of our case study and a story to take you through what our adventure has been, our journey has been at Blink and how the job landscape has changed because I think as part of the story, you're going to hear about some very different jobs that we've had at Blink along the way and how as we've expanded and grown, the different skills that we're looking for. As you can see, this is just looking at the last five years at Blink. But back in 2010, we had about 16 people today. We have just about 85, a couple more. And we have some big goals for this year. Our goal is to get to 120. So that's a big jump for us ahead. So just to take you a little bit through our journey. So 2010 was a big pivot point for us at this point. We had been doing small business websites for a little while. But we were using a couple of different CN masses, trying out a few things. And one day we made the decision we were going to be all Drupal. And this was actually a New Year's resolution. And I said, I came in and told my team of just a few people who are actually still working with us today. And I said, you know what? We're going to be Drupal only. A couple people said, huh? But now they don't think that anymore. But in those days, the people we needed on the team, we had a few developers and we needed Swiss knives. I'm sure you guys all know what a Swiss knife is. Somebody who can write code, talk to clients, do their own QA. Maybe open Photoshop and move some things around and do a little bit of design too. That was the core of our team at the time. And it's changed quite a bit. So 2011 was our move into more of the mid-market clients after we had made this all Drupal decision and the acceleration started. So we started to add some new job roles. In order to enter into the mid-market, we needed project managers and QA. No longer were our devs doing our QA and managing their schedules. And this was really key at that point with the type of clients that we had. And it was also a key year because as we started to change our client base, we were one of the first Drupal shops who became the top level Acquia partners at the time. Now Acquia has over 800 partners. So it's been amazing really to see the ecosystem change and come to DrupalCon year over year and see the growth, see the changing atmosphere. So 2011 was our next step in a journey. 2011 was all about holding our enterprise skills. And we started with, this was the first time we did some mass migration. So this was an exciting year. We migrated over a hundred sites for Warner Music in a matter of months. And I can tell you those were some tight schedules and tight pressures. And the only way we were gonna get through it, we actually had a very big penalty associated with the potential of being late. And there was no way we were gonna be late. We're actually two days early. But in order to make that happen, we had to fine tune our process. We had to bring people on the team who really understood the enterprise. And if any of you have been through it, it's very different dealing with an enterprise client than it is a small business client that have different needs and scheduling and just even how you communicate with them. But at this point, our team became laser focused on enterprise delivery excellence. And it became ingrained in our culture. 2013. Now we had gotten to a point in 2013 where I know unlike a lot of the other shops that I had earlier focused on just having a team where I could reach them and touch them and know everybody was going to sit together and in the office. But we've gotten to a point where we needed to grow faster. And the only way to do that was have supporting teleworking, opening up other offices and becoming a more virtual team. And part of that we had to build out, again, new processes. We built out training programs so we could bring people on the team who were new or newer to Drupal and get them on board. Today we have offices in two hemispheres and three continents. And we all work as an integrated team to deliver to our clients. Now, back to today. Well, long way, 2014. Long, long way from the dev who could do it all. But we still have those guys on our team. As I said, there's still a role for them. But there's a lot of other roles, right? We're not just looking for devs. We have an executive team. I have a management team. We have a sales team. We have a recruiting team. We have a marketing team. You know, we have accounting team. So, you know, the job openings, the job recs that we're looking for, you know, are very diverse. You know, not just, you know, mid devs and so forth. So, you know, something I was, we were just talking about over here is, you know, when you start looking for folks of, you know, all these different skill levels, whether it be, you know, sales or recruiting or marketing, it's very, very different than looking for a developer or a creative. So, as you go through that, you need to fine tune your process as, you know, what you interview for and how people will fit into the team. So, you know, the story of Blinks growth is, you know, very much a story of Drupal and open source story. I mean, there's a lot of people that I've seen here, you know, year over year who have, you know, similar stories as they've grown, you know, maybe some not as fast, maybe it's taken a little bit of time, but, you know, these are the things that we've seen in the Drupal space. And, you know, I think what's really, you know, great about it is that there, and one of the reasons why that day in 2010, I said, you know what, we're gonna be Drupal and that's it. And the thing that's great about Drupal is there is opportunity for small business websites, for, you know, mid-market. And it's been, you know, a very exciting adventure. So, you know, where's Drupal now, where's it going? I think that it's still going strong. I mean, we all love to hear Drees every year talk about, you know, sort of the state of Drupal, the state of the union. And, you know, we can see the futures right ahead of us. So, why do you want a Drupal job? Lots of reasons. Two really big reasons that, you know, we're all gonna hear about a lot this week. Drupal 8 and Symphony are just around the corner. And this is really, I think, a big breakout time. We're going to see job openings and many, many more jobs, you know, coming to be. Because, you know, as we saw it, when we went from six to seven, and you know, there's new migrations that come up and new features, new client interests, but also something a little bit special with, with, you know, the onset or the integration of Symphony is we're gonna see new skilled needs and demands and opening up the market to, you know, bringing in symphony developers. Is it also, you know, the object-oriented platform, which will, I think, you know, I don't know if any of you have heard this before, but I have, you know, sometimes, oh, Drupal, yeah, PHP. It's not object-oriented, it's not cool. You know, and so we're gonna see a change there and many more people becoming interested in adopting it. So a little bit of statistics about why you want a Drupal job. The market's growing twice as fast as, you know, other industries, other job-type openings. We see, you know, web developers, software developers. So, you know, definitely one of the faster-growing industries. Looking at some statistics here. This is some recent data. So on Drupal.org, I'm trying to read this, it's 2,700 jobs, indeed we've got 2,800 jobs from employers and 1,100 from recruiters. That's enough to employ just about everybody at DrupalCon. So I think there's many more opportunities than there are folks out there. So training, which you guys are doing, is a really key thing that is helping fuel the growth. Also some interesting top trends from Indeed. If you look at top trends, you're not actually going to see any of the CMSs in there, but what you do see is some key skills that you're gonna see across CMSs, across platforms, across the web, things like HTML5 is number one technology trend. Other things, jQuery, past, social media, those are things that in the Drupalverse, you're gonna come across every day and great skills to have. So why do you want a Drupal job? Well, as we've talked about, there's opportunities in every space, whether you want to do freelance, whether you want to work at a Fortune 500 company or small shop, there's an opportunity. There's also opportunities for all different specialties. You're a creative person, front end, back end, dev ops, and as I was saying before, every marketing, accounting, and you love Drupal, you can join in. Another really key thing is some of these positions are timeless, remember before I said, why do you want a Drupal job today? And maybe even for tomorrow. I've been in the software industry for 20 years, which is good and bad, it means I'm old. But when I started, there was no web. But these types of positions, project managers, quality assurance, user experience, there were those positions 20 years ago, and likely they'll be similar ones in 20 years from now. So, very good opportunities to learn transferable skills. Drupal skills are open source skills, and open source is sharing, you learn communication skills. Learn how to work with teams and share your knowledge and experience. And these are all great things to grow your career for a long time. Last but not least, the salaries are pretty good. National average, 87,000, and so that's across the country. And I can tell you that in the major city is these salaries crawl way up into the six figures as well. So, not a bad job. So a couple of things I wanna leave you with, and I know the panel's gonna talk about this a little bit more, but a few little tips when you're looking for a job, some do's and don'ts. I think one of the most important things when you're out there looking is to really take some time and understand what's the right job for you. There's lots of different types of Drupal jobs working in lots of different industries and size companies. Take a few minutes and reflect, what are your values? What do you really love? Will you like being a freelancer? Will you like working at home? If you have to commute every day for an hour, even if you are getting that six-figure salary, are you gonna be happy of every day or you're getting in the car? And these are important things for you to take some time and think about before you go on your job interviews. And as I said, the panel's gonna talk about that a little bit more, but really just wanted to leave you with that because I think it's one of the most important things to remember is to do that analysis and know who you are and what you're looking for in your career. And last but not least, don'ts, don't fake it. Be honest when you're going on your job interviews. Again, I'm not sure you guys remember, depending on your age, anybody here remember Nilly Vanilly, pretty boy rock stars. We hear that term a lot in Drupal, Drupal rock stars, but what's really a rock star? You can be a beginner in Drupal and really be a rock star as long as you're true to that. And that's the opportunity that you're taking. So be true to yourself. Don't fake it till you make it and find what's right for you. Thanks everyone. So just a reminder, resistance is futile. Everyone will adopt Drupal. All right, thanks Nancy. So next from this sort of forest level perspective, we're gonna put some boots on the ground and talk to a couple of different people who found success in different ways. We're lucky to have today Gerardo Gonzalez who is with Civic Actions, James Rutherford of Media Current and Mike Herschel of Lullabot. And we hope that together their scenario is gonna represent most Drupal professionals and that they can give you some tips on how you can move your career forward. I guess we'll start with Gerardo. So Gerardo represents all of you recent college grads out there that have discovered Drupal and decided it may be your thing. He found his way into Drupal shortly after earning his Masters in Computer Science and his exposure to Drupal led him on the path that brought him to an engineering position at Civic Actions in 2013. So you want to? Hi. Awesome. Just making sure you're awake. So as you heard my name is Gerardo and I work for Civic Actions. What's interesting specifically about Civic Actions is that we try... Well, the company started working a lot with nonprofits so in the Civic space and now we're trying to move into the government space so still trying to change the world in a different way but always with that in mind. And today... Man, this... I want to see all the information at once. I don't want this fancy stuff. All right. There you go. So who am I? My name is Gerardo and you can find me in Drupal.org as fMizzle and if you use Twitter... I don't think a lot of people do, but I'm MermanGTC there. One of the things... Well, let's see. Are any of you graduated recently or are planning to go to university for computer science? Okay. A couple. That's good because I was about to say, like, next. None of this stuff is relevant to you. But... So I really wanted to... put a little bit of perspective now that I am deep into the Drupal world. What kind of lessons did I learn from my education and how did that take me up to the point that I am today? And so I want to talk about whether education is relevant to a Drupal career at all. So the first thing that I want to say about education is that it brings breadth of knowledge to any individual. So that's probably the first thing that you're pushed into is you've got to study humanities, even if you're trying to be a computer scientist. You've got to study biological sciences. You've got to study mathematics. And how that's helpful is that it allows you to see the world from different perspectives. And that's always useful, just to have that breadth and diversity. And the second thing that I find interesting about going to university and getting an education in that manner is that it also gives you breadth within the field that you're looking at. So a lot of people that are web developers, they are very knowledgeable in the stack. They know about servers. They know about front end. They know about JavaScript. They know about back end. But at university, you also get to see a lot of other pieces of what computer science is about. So you get to see about operating systems and compilers. And some of the things that seem to become trendy, like UX experience, but these things have been around forever. Like interaction between humans and machines have been a problem that has been around forever. And you get to study those kind of things from a different perspective, a broader perspective than just web development when you're in university. So I found that that was very useful when I got my first job. But I also want to talk about me and my experience while in university. And I think that the most valuable part was that I got involved and I started trying to apply some of the things that I was learning by becoming part of that research team. So I got an opportunity as an undergraduate to go and do some research on artificial intelligence, machine learning, artificial life. And at that point is when things really started clicking. And a lot of these buzzwords that you just hear around really started to make sense. Like why do I really need to have testing in my code? And then when you start working with a team, you realize that it is important that when you're collaborating that you're not stepping on each other's toes and that tests can really keep that level of quality across a team. The same thing with version control. It's hard to manage the same code between multiple people if you don't have a way to see what the changes are, whether the changes that were made are relevant. And so a lot of these different things that you hear about become more relevant when you're working in complex systems, when you're working in groups, and when you're trying to work with other people's code also. Because that's a complete different animal when you're trying to utilize somebody else's code that is not well documented, that is not well tested. And then you also start seeing the perspective of bringing big systems together. And so I thought that was interesting that I was able to just go and start practicing from the university this type of skill. So my first advice for those people that are in university right now or that are planning on going is go ahead and get involved. Go ahead and try it out because that is the best, that is a playground. Once you're getting the workforce, you're going to be a lot more restricted to try these things unless you have no social life and you just have plenty of time to do it on the weekends. But while you're at university, that is encouraged. It is encouraged that you go and try these things out. So that's the first thing. Now, oh man, see, I had more stuff, but you guys didn't see it. Oh, you didn't see it, did you? Okay. So my first job was with a small media company with a very small team. And my education, as I mentioned, served me well in which I knew a lot of these things that I was required to do even though I have never done it professionally. So I did an iPhone app for them and we had to do some user testing. And then I had to analyze the user testing and do changes to the code. And so all of these different skills, I had to learn PHP, Objective C, how to manage databases, all of these things within the first year of my job without ever having to do it in a professional setting before or in university. I was training Java and so all these things were new to me. But the fact that I had that training and that breadth allowed me to move fast and be able to be effective in my first job. So that was good. And then after that first year, my company decided that I was okay, that I wasn't a complete failure, and that it would be okay for them to keep me and try to help them with their websites. So that's when I started looking at Drupal. So the way I learned Drupal might be helpful to a few people. I learned everything first from a book and I have the title of the book there that was very helpful to me as a developer pro Drupal 7 for development. That just made everything click in my mind. And the other thing that was very helpful for me to learn Drupal is just using Drupal the wrong way. And the reason why that was helpful is that usually when you go to Drupal and treat it just as a CMS, you just get to a lot of clicking and things happen and it's awesome. And that's the power of Drupal. But when I was trying to use it to create a set of management for payments and for users and for other things that are not generally CMS type stuff, then I got to dive really deep into some of the subsystems like the menu system and the rendering system. And that just gave me a complete new perspective of the kind of things that I could do with Drupal and what I couldn't do with Drupal. And so it was very useful to use it in the wrong way and also the only contributor module that I have out there which is the entity construction kit was born from that experience of trying to use Drupal the wrong way but it seems like that's the direction in which we're going, that we want Drupal to be able to do not only websites but also any other kind of web applications. So it's been great in that sense. So I guess what I... what I want you to take away from my personal experience from my first job is that I was in this small shop and so I didn't get a chance to really do a lot of the things that a lot of the job descriptions require. Like I wasn't an expert on testing and I didn't really need to do like complex staging setups for deployment because it was just a small company. But once I discovered that I loved the web and that I figured that I wanted to stay within the web I just put a focus on that and I say, okay, what is the next step from here? I am a small company but I probably eventually want to go to a company that's going to be doing development 100%. What kind of skills do they require? What kind of technologies are they using? What kind of processes are they using? I noticed that a lot of the companies were using agile methodologies for their project management. So I kind of started diving into that as a team of one trying to manage myself in an agile way. I know it sounds ridiculous but it just gave me a little bit of perspective on the kind of knowledge and that kind of space that those companies were working into at the enterprise level just so I didn't feel left out once I was going to go to apply for the next level. So I think it's very important for you to keep your mind focused to where you want to go and make sure that you apply the kind of knowledge of the next space to what you're doing right now even if it's not required. And so the last thing that I want to mention is that the best resume is to know stuff. It was mentioned already. Do not fake it. Just push yourself out there, gain the knowledge and then it's going to be easy. My interview process with Civic Actions was a couple of interviews across a month and it was so straightforward, so simple. It was just like having a conversation here in DrupalCon with any other developer about Drupal. So it was just a pleasure and they enjoy who I was. I enjoy who they were and it was just a click because I wasn't trying to fake anything. I just have been using the technology and I knew what they wanted and I have been trying to do what they wanted and it just happens. That's the only thing, just don't fake it, try it out, do the thing, put yourself out there and some of these other guys I'm sure you're going to talk about the community but I wanted to focus on what education brings to the table when it comes to Drupal. So that's it for me. Thank you. Alright, thanks Gerardo. Next is our experienced developer who found Drupal well into his developer career. James Rutherford is the lead developer, Drupal architect at Media Current and he discovered Drupal about eight years ago and has built his Drupal career with a focus on migration which served him well as he personally handled the migration of all the Georgia.gov data to Drupal. So here's James. That was a little bit of an exaggeration. There was a really big team that worked on that Georgia.gov project but yeah, it was part of that. So hi, I'm James. Can I see slides? How does that work? Hang on there so we can see the slides. Sorry. Are your notes in there? I don't have any notes because I just like to talk about myself. Slides are up here so. That's a big enough answer yet. Oh, then you won't be able to advance them. So. Technology. Let's put it on the screen. Oh, you got your choice to either see the slides or be able to advance them. Alright, I guess I need to advance them so it can work. Yeah, that's fine. This will work fine. Alright, I'm going to put on the other one now. You have to reset the hole. It's fine. Sorry. Is that? Yeah, I guess so. So that's where we are now? Yeah. I'm going to do this a lot. I have a small tiny icon down here. Alright, yeah. So I'm James Rutherford. I am a lead Drupal architect at Media Current. I've been working with Drupal for about eight years and before that I had sort of a traditional graduate from school. Work at software companies and then eventually became a Drupal professional. My projects include Georgia.gov. What else did I put on here? And yeah, I've been working on the Weather Channel project which has been really interesting. And I don't have a cool title. I'm just James Rutherford on D.O. and James Rutherford on Twitter. That's who I am. So I think that was a great approach earlier. For the people that are in here right now, how many of you are software professionals that are currently working with Drupal but aren't specifically working at a Drupal shop? Yeah, that's a lot of you. So you're probably at the point in your career where you're working with Drupal daily and you're thinking, I like this technology. I might want to commit to this technology. Is this the right time for me to make a jump and start talking to shops and shift gears, right? Do I want to pour my time and effort and growing as a professional into Drupal? The answer is no. That's a terrible idea. No, it's not. It's yes, you should. Let me give you a little bit more background about myself if I can read my own slides. I started off as a technical, as a geek I guess as a little kid. I got an Apple II when I was like a little tiny guy and then got my first PC and ran a bulletin board service, you know, dial up and all that. So I've always been interested in communication technologies, the web early on. It's always been something that I was really passionate about. So I went to Georgia Southern University over there in Savannah and got into their new information technology degree, which is a slight aside from a traditional CS degree in that they focused on emerging web technologies and on media as well. And then from there I graduated and went to a, I guess, like a traditional software company, this company called Management Dynamics, and they produced an information system that tracked shipping rates. It was riveting work, really. It was amazing. But from there, I joined Georgia Public Broadcasting. At the time that I joined GPV, they had an in-house Java-based CMS, and I joined as a junior developer and worked under their lead there, and we sort of maintained the CMS for two years, and he went off, he left for Greener Pastors, and I became the lead there, and we started assessing our CMS and started looking at other solutions to move forward in the future. And as probably some of you in the audience have gone through, we did a selection process and eventually found Drupal, and I led the migration to Drupal 5 at that point, and then we sort of figured out all the things that we did wrong when we migrated to Drupal 5 because we did it ourselves. We were able to find a ton of help on IRC and in the forums and sort of work with people to figure out what we should be doing. And so from there, we fixed our problems, and then I started really attending like local meetups. I went to the ADUG group a couple of times, started going to Drupal Cons, as you guys are at Drupal Cons now, and I started talking to people, and I really enjoyed meeting everybody. I mean, I think as far as software groups go and as communities go, they're passionate, and they're fun, and you guys are going to get a lot of fun when Mike comes up to follow me. He's going to blow your way, but the community aspect of it really drew me to it, and that was where I was able to make that decision where I had met a few people, I had met Dave Terry, who's the owner of Media Current, who I work for now, and he kind of fished like, hey, I saw the new D6 site at GPB, it looks great, you guys have done a lot of good work, and then, you know, sorry, I'm getting kind of ahead of myself. I wasn't sure that I wanted to be a full-time Drupal Dev, but by immersing myself in the technology, and by going all in at the office that I was at, and spending a lot of time in the community, the job kind of found me. Dave was coming back around again and saying, you know, are you ready? Do you want to talk to us? Is this what you want to do? And the decision kind of made itself for me. Who am I? Now I'm going backwards. This is good. Yeah, alright, so I covered this a little bit. We migrated from our legacy CMS to Drupal 5, covered this. Yeah, active on D.o., and then I continued to grow as a professional, which I think is really important. We touched on that a little with our last speaker, is that you can't just decide that you do want to jump into Drupal. I wouldn't advise that to anybody. You need to not just join the community, immerse yourself in the technology. Absolutely, your best resume is going to be your contributions on D.o., if you're brand new, or your GitHub account. Show that you have the chops to do it by contributing back to the community. And not only will you be able to use that on your resume, but you'll make friends and the connections that will help you find the Drupal shop that fits the culture that you look for, the kind of person that you want to be as a developer. Is that it? I'm done. Thanks. I'm not quite done, but... Yeah, so, again, if you're looking to make that jump, we talked about growing as a professional, but absolutely the best thing you need to do is just talk to everybody. Go to the booth, come by the media current booth, talk to our developers, talk to our leadership. Make as many connections as you can here, because not only is it important when you're selecting the firm that you want to... If you want to go full-time as a Drupalist, it's important to get that job, it's important to work with the right group of people. Different companies have different culture, and you need to be able to fit into that to be successful. Otherwise, you might not like it, but it might not be that you're working with Drupal. It's just that you're not used to that culture. All right, thanks. Right, thanks, James. Next up is Mike Herschel, who is our hobbyist turned pro pathfinder. He just recently joined Lullabot. I mean, like, I think a few weeks ago, right? Yeah, like four weeks ago. Back in developer. Mike started as an IT manager and webmaster for a small construction company after he got his associate's degree. And he got into Drupal as a pastime and eventually leveraged it to create a career out of his passion. Next up is Mike Herschel. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm actually a friend and developer. Oh, I'm sorry. No, no worries. All right, so I was supposed to have a cowboy hat and boots and chaps and all that, but I don't know. I know. This is going to be pretty great. Thank you. I can't disappoint myself. All right, so I started doing website development in 2001. I was using macromedia fireworks to draw everything, and then I would go to File, Export, HTML, and would make these awesome table-based layouts with hot links and all that type of stuff. And I thought I was really awesome back then. I started doing my brother's band websites and some other websites, and I was pretty cool, right? So I started doing website, I started my own web development agency in 2004, concentrating on the up-and-coming real estate market because that was always going to go up. And that was pretty cool until about 2007 when that kind of crashed out. And I got into Drupal in 2008, and I was looking into different content management systems because I was going to make the best website on the internet. And I knew I hated Joomla, and I used to do A at Classic ASP. I hated that. So I did go ahead and make the best website right there. This is it. This is the best website on the entire internet. I initially did it in Drupal 5.3 right now it's still around D6. But the reason I bring this up is because I'm a big believer and the best way to learn is by doing. By putting together a decent-sized website, you end up coming into challenges and having to solve those challenges. And that's the best way to learn. There's a mantra out there called Just Build Websites. If you guys ever listened to the Shop Talk Show podcast, they're front-end developers. They have this audio clip in there says Just Build Websites. Because that's how you learn, right? So how do you build websites? I was lucky. I had a job where I could bring this technology. I could bring Drupal into my work. But I migrated this evil collection of 4,000 static HTML files with ASP includes to Drupal. And I did a couple subsites too. I also did a good amount of freelancing work which was awesome. You know? So at that point in my career, I really, really love the software. But that was about it. What really got me out there was the Florida Drupal community. So I attended my first ever Florida Drupal camp was in February 2010. So this is a picture of the first Florida Drupal camp. And there I am right there. Yeah, it looked like it, but I'm having a blast. I was like, this is awesome. You know? And so this is in 2010. In 2012, I decided I'm going to start getting out there, meeting everybody here and kind of insert myself into this process. So in 2012, I helped out with marketing. In 2013, I really stepped up. I did the website. I did marketing and a bunch of other stuff. And last year, I also did a lot of stuff, too. I did the website marketing and a bunch of other really cool stuff. So what this really comes into is like putting yourself out there, right? So what do I mean by putting yourself out there? Like, join your local meetup groups. You know, meet people. I mean, if you want to get jobs, if you want to get a sense of if someone loves their job at Media Current Lullabah, Blink Reaction, any, you know, talk to these people. If you don't have a local meetup group, start your local meetup group. That makes you look cooler, right? I'm the organizer of the Drupal and Frontend Developer Groups in New Gainesville, Florida. That doesn't mean I know anything. But, you know, that's good. So travel to regional meetups. You know, I've traveled to the Jacksonville meetup. Have I made it down to Orlando? I've been to Brevard. Just to get out and putting yourself out there is important. And present. You know, get out there and put together a presentation on something. Something that you're passionate about. And you don't have to really know about it, because what you can do is you can, you know, commit to presenting on something, and then it forces you to learn something. You know, it's awesome. And participate in your camps and your conferences. And if you don't want to do Drupal, there's plenty of front-end stuff or PHP back-end stuff to do. And, like I said, present. Get yourself out there. So here's the secret. Most Drupal camps are hungry for presentations. They want you to submit presentations, and they want you to give these presentations. And so, like, I gave my first presentation I think in 2012. I gave two presentations that year at Florida Drupal Camp, and I was nervous as hell. You know, but everybody's nervous. I'm nervous right now just being up here, but you do it over and over again and you get used to it. You know, I had a really good friend of mine, his name is Kyle, and he's not even a Drupal developer at our front-end meetup. So he's in front of a group of, like, 15 people. And I see him, like, kind of, like, shaking a little bit, you know? But it was his first time, and he's like, hey, could you tell I was nervous. I was like, no way, man, you were awesome. But it's good, you know. It's good to do that type of stuff. So another thing is, like, finding a niche. So, like, when I got into back... Wait a minute, hold on. No flash. That's a bad joke. Yeah, don't specialize in flash. So when I got into website development, I did everything, right? System administration, setup, development, site building, all the front-end, which, of course, right now. But what I'm trying to get to is, like, find out what you love and do it. You know, like, I love the fusion of art and technology, and that's really kind of what attracted me to the front-end, you know? And, like, front-end development is also kind of undergoing, like, a little renaissance right now with, like, all the... all the MVC frameworks coming out, like Angular and Backbone and stuff like that. So that's me right there. So another thing is put your code out there, right? Get your code samples. And this is what James said, you know? Get it up on d.o. or on GitHub. And make sure you're... make sure you're... make sure it's interesting stuff, you know? Put something cool up there. It doesn't have to be, like, novel, but it has to be good, you know? Make sure your code samples are following, like, the... what is it? The coding standards, yeah. And... Sorry. What are coding standards? You know? You got spaces and tabs. That's cool. But, um... people will evaluate you, and when you have a potential employer looking for you, what are they going to do? They're going to Google you, right? So make sure you Google yourself. And they're going to find your GitHub account. They're going to find you on Drupal.org. And make yourself look good, you know? At least from their perspective, you don't actually have to look good right here. Um... So, by the... you know, by the time I was looking for jobs, I can't see this. You know, I had my niche. I had my code samples. Some websites under my belt. I knew a lot about companies that I wanted to work for and companies that I didn't want to work for because I talked to people. And I just went for it. You just start applying, and people will talk to you. It's really hot right now. You guys are in an enviable position. There are a lot of careers in the country right now where it's tough to get jobs. We are so lucky. So I want to talk about why I come to these conferences right here. Because these are awesome. So I like to learn what's new. Like, what's new and exciting. I want to know how to pronounce it. So I don't have to go to, like, say, like... Cool it later, right? And then, mainly, I go to conferences to meet people. I'm not in this picture, but I took the picture. It's just cool to meet people, to become friends with people, to learn from people. I love walking into a room and just knowing that there's 10 more people in here that are way more intelligent than me and just having that rub off on me. There are people I can hang out with and I feel like my IQ raises. It goes up a little bit, you know? And so, in conclusion, today, get out and talk with people and make a list of companies that you think are good fits. Go walk up and down the aisles, talk to them, see what they do, write down... You don't have to give your resume, just say, hey, are you guys hiring and write down the list and check out their website later and talk to them. Meet people at the social events. Give them your business card, right? Go to these parties. Lullabot is having a party on Wednesday night at the handle bar on the rooftop. That's awesome. That's cool, you know? Come to that. I want to see all you guys there. If you don't have business cards, there is an app for that. Lullabot just released this app. You don't need an app on your receiving end. It just sends an email. It looks cool. So that's just like a quick plug. Oh, yeah. And Lullabot is also hiring. We are hiring Drupal developers, Frontend developers. I think pretty much everything out there. There's even another category, too. If you don't see exactly what you do there, Lullabot is hiring. We're looking to grow just like all these other companies are looking to grow. So, yeah. So that's me. All right. Thanks, Mike. I'm going to talk about Drupal's career waypoints, which we hope is going to be useful for aspiring developers no matter what your background is. Mike Ginello has been developing Drupal sites for more than seven years, and he specializes in module development, theming, and general site building, and recently joined the team of developers working on the Drupal 8 migrating core. He's also the architect of the Drupal Career Starter Program, which I so enthusiastically told you about earlier. And through that program, he's been helping people for the past four years to get a fast track on a Drupal career. He's had a lot of experience in working with a lot of the companies that are here in setting up internships and mentorships. Mentorships. And really glad to have Mike present the next portion. I just realized, I just realized as I'm sitting down there that I have to follow Herschel, which is not an editable position. So. We're here. I was about to compliment you by saying that, you know, he's from Florida, like I'm from Florida and know you can't have him because we want him there, so. Anyway, so, you know, my name is Mike Ginello. I am passionate about Drupal, especially about Drupal training. I've been doing it for a while. I actually have a little bit of a background in teaching. My degrees are actually engineering degrees. And as part of the deal with my master's, I didn't have to pay for it, but I had to teach. And that's when I kind of got the bug. So what I'm going to be talking about is career waypoints. And the way I look at this is I've been fortunate enough to be able to take four groups of people who could barely pronounce the word Drupal up to the point where they were employable in a matter of 10 weeks. We've done this four times over the past four years. And some people have succeeded and some people haven't. By experiencing that with these groups of people, I'm in a pretty good position to be able to talk about what qualities I see in people that help me identify who's going to succeed and who isn't going to succeed. So that's kind of what we're going to talk about today. Okay, so first of all, we're going to talk about is Drupal right for you? And here are a few of the keywords I like to talk about. And I mentioned this normally right upfront with a lot of our students. I talk about you really need to be self-motivated. And I think all of our living case studies mention that. Drupal is not something that's going to come find you. You pretty much have to go out and find Drupal. You have to be the ones that I want to learn this stuff because it's not easy and I've got to figure out what's going on. You need to be a little bit disciplined. A lot of Drupal jobs are in val telecommuting or being a bit independent. We've had a class who were smart as a whip very technically competent, but when it came time to actually perform in internships they did not have the discipline to work from home or to follow up on tasks or to be available when they were supposed to be available. It was shocking to us the first time or two that we saw it, but then we just realized that's a life skill that some people just haven't developed. I think within a Drupal career especially if you're telecommuting consulting where you're not working out of an office, it's something that's very important that you need to have. You need to be organized. Again, especially if you are contracting or especially if you are taking on little side jobs where the buck stops with you so you have to know when things are due and what you've told clients and how much it's going to cost and keep track of your hours and all of those little non-technical tasks that help keep your business going. This one I think is probably my most favorite. I think it's really important to be a little bit humble and to know that when you don't know something you have to like not bang your head for 12 hours trying to figure it out but open up IRC or open up go to Drupal forums if you're brave or go to a meetup and ask, admit that you don't know something because there are thousands not exaggerating thousands of people in this community who are willing to help so you have to be brave enough to say I can't figure this out I know I should know this but I don't know this can someone point me in the right direction and more often than not it's a two-minute explanation that will get you back on track. Again, we've had students who really technically super smart but get stuck stuck on something and I see this every time we do this class or our long-form class where there's a homework assignment that should take 60-90 minutes and I have students come back saying oh I spent all weekend on this because I couldn't figure out how to do X and I'm like I was on IRC all weekend why didn't you ask you know so you need to be humble you need to be able to ask for help when you need it and then generosity I think might touch on it really well you know when you give back to the community it's in one sense it's a very nice thing to do it helps the community it's the kumbaya link arms and let's all do it dance but I'll show you in a few minutes you know it's okay to be selfish you are marketing yourself you're promoting yourself you're positioning yourself by doing all this it's helping you and that's okay so if you make the decision where you want to dive deep into Drupal and you want to you know build a Drupal here you know you need to learn and Gerardo mentioned that he used pro Drupal development which is a book that sits on my bookshelf as well but there's all other types of learning as well self-paced would be you know reading books watching you know the excellent build a module or Drupalize.me screencasts going to camps or cons and sitting in on sessions and learning things here or God forbid reading Drupal.org documentation how many people when you first picked up Drupal went to that documentation area and said oh here's some how to install Drupal how many people read that really holy cow that's I I didn't I so I struggled through that's great that's good to hear I didn't expect that many or even the one thing that really hooked me and helped me a lot is I got addicted to Drupal Planet so those of you who use an RSS reader or feed reader or even just go to Drupal.org slash Planet this is a semi curated list of blog posts that really you know take the pulse of the Drupal community any given day if you want to learn about what is kind of the happening thing in the Drupal community what are new techniques or new modules or updates or things with core reading Drupal Planet every day will you know for me it became addicting like I felt if I missed it for a day or two crap I'm falling behind but that's really how I picked up a lot of momentum was just reading that every day instructor led training this is something that we specialize in again there are trainings that a lot of Drupal camps the days before Drupal cons we do public online live trainings there are all kinds of places you can get Drupal training you know AQUI's got a thriving training partner program with a training page that lists a schedule upcoming trainings that are in person and virtual so if instructor led training is something that suits you definitely there's options out there and I'm not going to pretend that everybody learns the same way that's kind of something that I'm a firm believer in everybody learns differently some people learn best by reading a book some people learn best in a group environment some people learn best by having a one-on-one mentor to kind of that they can talk to one a week you know once a week and say hey here's what I'm doing am I kind of going in the right direction and you know maybe they course correct a little bit the point is you really have to figure out what works for you because there are resources in the Drupal community for all of these ways to learn Drupal and then career training again which is something we specialize in so I'm going to mention it this is normally more of a holistic experience it's less about or I shouldn't say less it's not just focused on knowledge but it's also focused on experience and community which I think are the three keys to really developing a Drupal skills to the point where you are employable at you know buy a Drupal shop or for a full-time Drupal job so what time what type of Drupal workers for you I think most people start off doing some type of side work you know consulting or contracting you know normally decent pay very flexible you're usually telecommuting but you know not very stable part-time work again great if you can get it but you have to find the right situation a little bit more stable full-time work which I think is where a lot of people eventually want to get to and I think in each of our three living case studies each of them kind of demonstrated it's very difficult to go from you know not really knowing Drupal into a full-time position it's normally something that you transition into and then entrepreneurship where you know you want to learn Drupal you want to get the skills because you want to start your own business that involves Drupal in some way and this is kind of the question I ask a lot of people when they're considering whether or not they want to you know dive into Drupal as far as going for a full-time position you know this is one of the things that Drupal offers is the ability to kind of control your own destiny especially right now or for the past few years you know shops are hungry for Drupal talent you can you know if you get one job and it works out well great if after three or four months you find out it's not a good fit either for technical or cultural reasons that's fine because right now it's a buyer it's a seller's market it's a seller's market where the we sell our knowledge I'll talk that through for a second but right now it's a great time to control your own destiny and figure out what you want to do and build up your skills and then pick and choose and find what is the best fit for you and then also you know something that Mike touched on Mike had to go you can pick your niche I mean a lot of people start off being site builders I can build a Drupal site I can create content types and fields and add modules and configure stuff but very quickly I think you'll find especially in full-time positions and I think the four recruiters can talk about this in a few minutes better than I can is those are kind of generalists and I think most full-time Drupal developers have some type of specialty whether it's front end development or custom module development or SEO or project management or you know information architecture or whatever it is so luckily again there are so many opportunities in the Drupal community to kind of test drive niches a great place is you know with contributions if you want to you know figure out if front end development is for you then get involved with some base theme or get involved with Drupal core you know in the theming layer if you want to figure out if data migration is for you I mean there's plenty of opportunities to figure out what you're most interested in and then you can bring that to the table when you go start looking for jobs saying hey I know how to build Drupal sites but I specialize in this I guess I already hit forward so there's a great blog post this is a couple years old or two or three years old by Moshe about picking your niche and it was a blog post about all the available niches and some of them that were and still are the ones he mentioned were site building, site design theming, custom model development project management, SEO commerce, accessibility, data migration those are just the ones I wrote down there's so many niches that are still wide open that if you can specialize in and bring that to the table that can only help you so here's kind of where my you know my heart really is is you know it's okay to leverage a Drupal community for yourself it's okay to be selfish that's kind of one of the reasons a community is here and I got ahead of myself but you can learn your niche or learn your skills through in the community you don't have to and I'm not going to pick on Gerardo here but you don't have to sit there and just read a book you can read that book then follow that up with contribution work or coming to camps and sitting on presentations and networking with people and joining a GDO group that is not graphic based but topic based obviously the networking that's kind of you know I'm willing to say half the people here at Drupal Con are here to network with other people meet people that they only talk with on IRC meet with clients find more developers take advantage of it go to meetups, go to camps go to cons, get on IRC network network network because when it comes time for you to need something for you to need a job or for you to need help you've developed your network and by attending these events it almost feels effortless I feel and then share position again I feel like Mike's presentation but my slides are in first so he stole mine since he's not here I can say that but by all means position yourself as an expert share what you know that's kind of one of the ways that I really got rolling with Drupal is I started presenting at every meetup I could there were times in Central Florida where I was presenting every other month on something so I was positioning myself as an expert even though I was kind of learning as I was going so share what you know if you don't like presenting then write you know write a blog apply to get it posted on Drupal Planet and literally every blog post you put out there will be seen by thousands of Drupal developers and here's a actually a little funny story I I started using PHP storm a couple months ago and I figured out how to you know set up debugging a certain way to debug Drush commands on it and I wrote and it was a little bit tricky so I wrote a little tiny blog post you know three or four paragraphs on a blog post and it was up there for about a month and I got an email from a publisher from a book publisher saying hey we've seen your blog a bunch of times we saw that you wrote a blog post on PHP storm would you be interested in writing a book I was like slow down first of all but I mean I am not a PHP storm expert there's but you know by having been writing the on the blog and by writing something about PHP storm I had unwittingly positioned myself as an expert with PHP storm which I had to kind of back away from and say it sounds great but let me tell you and then again you know be a little selfish allow yourself to use the community to further your career it is okay that's kind of one of the points of the community being here I know plenty of people who who are hesitant to do it because they feel guilty about it but it's really okay and that's kind of one of the big messages I want to get across and this is kind of my formula for when I see students come through people who are just really book smart are going to have kind of a hard time people who have lots of experience but not necessarily experience doing things the right way are going to have a hard time people who are really active in the community you know if they're not that bright or I shouldn't say not that bright if they don't have a lot of experience or they don't go deep in any niches they're still going to have a hard time but it's not going to be as hard if you don't have the knowledge or the experience a blend of all three an equal blend I think is what most people are probably looking for okay so definitely you don't want if you decide that you want to build a Drupal career and you want to build up your knowledge or build up yourself to a point where you can go after a full-time job be warned don't focus just on knowledge get out there build a hobby site build a site for a local non-profit just get some experience build up your knowledge and get involved in the community because I'm willing to bet that our four recruiters will say that they look at all three things maybe equally maybe not but we'll find out in a few minutes okay oh that was my last slide alright thank you alright great thanks Michael so we're going to camp off with a panel of discussion of the principals and recruiters from some of the world's top Drupal shops so let me start with Kim Pepper who is co-founder and technical director of Previous Next in Australia Kim and his team work with high-profile clients mainly in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne that include the federal government the government of New South Wales as well as National Library of Australia and the corporate site for Fremantle Media Australia I thought this was cool because TV shows like The X Factor and Australia's Got Talent so Kim if you want to join us up here we're going over crossing the pond now to Steve Parks who is a co-founder of Wonder Crout a pan-European web consultancy group with 140 staff in nine countries Steve is also the managing director of the UK division that's called Wonder Root Wonder Crout is the largest full service agency for Drupal CMS in Europe and serves some pretty well-known brands and forward-thinking governments like Germany, Ikea, Optima Bank and Nokia Siemens Networks interesting thing about Steve you're going to like to listen to him he used to be a BBC radio reporter as well so Mike Minnecke is director of technology and leads and coaches Austin based Four Kitchens technical team Four Kitchens 20 employees serve diverse clients including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Time NBC, Stanford and the Economist they pride themselves as being and staying a small Drupal shop that does everything in-house and then Eric Gaffin is the global manager of talent acquisition at Acquia where he manages an international team of recruiters to staff Acquia's nine offices on three continents all of which have openings right now totaling about 80 positions across all disciplines Acquia's rise on the global IT stage along with the recently securing $50 million in finance