Echidna, Fanshawe Program Embraces Knowledge-Sharing Ideal of Drupal

As you know, the heart of Drupal is built upon a foundation of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and teamwork. As an open-source technology, Drupal benefits from the shared experience of its developers to iterate, test, and innovate.

And that's why we're thrilled to announce that today marks the start of a 12-week, free Drupal training course that we're offering for Fanshawe College students in the Interactive Media Design and Production and Interactive Media Specialist programs.

Students can take this 12-week course at no cost. Digital Echidna provides the teachers; Fanshawe College generously donates the location and computers. To start, 15 students have been selected to participate in this program.

We're excited about this program for a number of reasons. First, this is the first time that Fanshawe College has partnered with a local digital company to do this type of program, providing a course or workshop-style training environment. As well, as a company that has focused on Drupal development for the past few years, we're always excited to see new talent come into the marketplace already familiar with the content management system -- in fact, five of the students in this program are our future interns and three of them are co-op students at Digital Echidna. More importantly, this type of early training can help increase the number of Drupal-trained developers in London and in Canada as a whole.

Fanshawe has always been at the vanguard of working with industry to understand what the market requires today and where it's going in the future. From working with industry partners to develop core curricula, to initiatives like this 12-week program, Fanshawe is showing leadership in providing its students with some of the best opportunities to succeed.

From Echidna's standpoint, we're honoured to be a part of this program and it's exciting to see so many of our staff members given the opportunity to share their knowledge. Fatima, Jordan, Luke, and Scott will each be responsible for teaching three weeks of the program, covering everything from a basic introduction to Drupal to local development setup, site building, theming, and back-end development.

As this is a free course, students won't be receiving a credit, but in today's competitive job market, having additional knowledge and experience is always going to set you apart. This is especially true for students who often have limited resumes. For a company that specializes in Drupal development, I can assure you that people who have experience with the CMS -- whether it's something formal like this class, or someone showing the initiative by building something on Drupal on their own -- will always be appreciated.

We've often said how much we appreciate the presence of Fanshawe College and Western University in this city. It gives us a competitive advantage in that we have access to a steady stream of incredible talent each and every year. And we're happy to give back whenever and wherever we can.

It's the first day of school for our Echidnas -- and possible Echidnas-to-be! And we couldn't be more excited.