2011 Brings an Increased Demand for Open Source CMS Skills

By Josette Rigsby (@techielicous) Jan 20, 2011

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It’s the third week of the new year. If we’re being honest, some of those delusions, I mean resolutions, have already been put in the recycling bin for next year’s list. Now that you’ve put those annoying annual promises aside, instead of shedding pounds, consider packing on some new valuable skills to improve your career prospects.

Opportunities for the New Year

The information technology industry is still slowly recovering from the economic recession. However, many organizations remain hesitant about investing in new projects and staff. Despite this cautious environment, opportunities to implement and manage open source content management systems (CMS) — especially WordPress (news, site), Joomla (news, site) and Drupal (news, site) — are rapidly increasing.

Open source CMSs often list “ease of use” as key advantage, however, in all but the simplest implementations, developing and managing them frequently necessitates a skilled technical resource. George DeMet, permanent member of the Drupal Association and co-chair of DrupalCon Chicago (and Founder and Co-owner of boutique web consultancy Palantir.net) said,

We’ve seen 40% growth in demand for Drupal work. There are more available Drupal jobs than there are resources. This is one of the reasons that DrupalCon Chicago will offer so many training opportunities — to address this skill shortage.

Adding new skills is always helpful for technical professionals, but given the current job market, it is even more valuable.

New Skills

Now that you’re convinced open source CMS skills are better than six-pack abs, how do you start? Implementing a CMS platform can involve multiple roles:

Programmer — use a language like PHP, Ruby or Java to develop components, modules or plug-ins for the platform.
Site Builders — have experience with the platform architecture and features. Site builders focus on site configuration.
Front End Designers/Themers — focus on site aesthetics using tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
System Administrators — focus on platform and infrastructure maintenance. Administrators might have operating system and web server skills in addition to platform knowledge.

Developing the skills for any of the roles will put you on a path to becoming proficient in a tool.

Once one or more areas of specialization has been selected, how long will it take to become a rock star? It’s very feasible to develop the skills necessary to implement an open source CMS in six to twelve months, even if it’s not used in your primary employment.

WordPress, Joomla and Drupal all have numerous low cost resources for independent study. Anyone that wants to learn can download the tool, read the documentation and start developing. Novices benefit from the very active developer communities — most issues new users experience are already resolved and documented. This documentation is a rich source of information for enhancing platform knowledge and accelerating the learning process. There are also multiple books, online tutorials and conferences offering intensive training independent learners can use to become knowledgeable.