Growing a Drupal Talent
For the past several weeks I've been working with an intern from one of the local community colleges. It's been a terrific experience -- at least for me, and I'm hoping that he's getting some good ideas and experience out of the process.
He's been studying web development at the community college for a couple of years -- that has provided him with a good baseline set of skills and understandings to work with, but he came to us with no idea what Drupal was, and frankly had learned nothing about open source, php as a markup/development language, or any of the specifics you might hope would be coming out of the community colleges.
Now, the mornings he comes in to work have tended to be busy times for me, so I haven't been able to sit on top of him, as I've discovered I have a tendency to want to do. Meetings and other commitments have forcibly broken me of my micromanaging habits, and I've had to just give him targets, some resources for learning methods and solutions, and then turn him loose on a Drupal site we wanted to rebuild.
And it's working.
He's taken on several projects now -- rebuilding sites, upgrading and improving on some existing sites, and has proven an inclination to solve problems and get things done.
This has turned into a real eye-opener for me. I work in a place where we spend a lot of time talking about project-based learning, and with most of the people I've tried to turn into Drupal-heads, I've been clining to my old habits of showing folks how to do things, walking them through my own process, and not giving them time to explore and figure it out on their own.
Which is not mean to take all the credit for the intern's success -- he's a great guy, a hard-working, tenacious worker who jumps in when there's a need. That sort of attitude is going to be invaluable in just about any field. But I think that giving him room to figure things on on his own has both given him time to learn and own the Drupal material, and proven to me that he has the sort of work ethic anyone would love to have on their team.
His name? I'm not telling you. ;) Find your own intern.
