Learn.WordPress to Keep Your Developer Skills 100 Percent

Robbie: Hello, and welcome to this BizChat version of Do the Woo. I’m very excited today. I’m Robbie Adair, by the way, and I’m very excited today to be welcoming Courtney Robertson onto the show. We’re going to talk about one of my most favorite topics, which is training. And so, Courtney, welcome to the show.

Courtney: Hey Robbie, it’s actually really good that I got to chat with you today. I’ve heard a lot about you. Other people have told us to connect, so it’s good that we get to have this conversation. I’m excited, thanks.

Robbie: Absolutely, yes. Yes, it’s nice to actually put a face with a name, because we have chatted a few times in the channels, but it’s always nice to see people in person. You work for GoDaddy as your day job, but then when you put on your nighttime hero cape, you are one of three that run Learn for WordPress, correct?

Courtney: Yeah. I work at GoDaddy Pro as a dev advocate. I do get to put a little bit of time through Five For the Future in during my day, towards what I do at make.wordpress.org/trainingteam, where the team behind learn.wordpress.org. But I also do contribute, in addition to that, whether that’s through attending a contributor event or working on some writing that exceeds perhaps work hours, there’s just a lot going on. And I really care a lot about training people with WordPress.

The Learn.WordPress.org team

Robbie: I know, when I saw, because I’m in the channels, and I see you and I’m just like, “I don’t think Courtney ever sleeps,” like you and the other two leaders of the group, I’m just like, like you guys are always in there. You’re always talking. You’re always taking care of things. I’m just like very impressed. And so tell me about your other coordinators too though, and how you guys do split up. I think that’s a great idea that you have three leads, not just one lead, because if one lead goes out for a while or whatever, it affects the team, but having three, how do you guys distribute that?

Courtney: Yeah, so I handle a good bit of the educational perspective, the instruction design. We have a few contributors that respond to wrote automatic, specifically working on creating content for Learn. So I interface a bit with them. We all chat together as we do, but Hauwa is based out of the UK. She is a Nigerian lady. A lot of folks have probably encountered Hauwa through of places like WordFest. She brings her skills as a project manager to our team. And that is so valuable when we think about constantly evolving curriculum and writing and training materials, dot org chips and updates, uh oh we got to revise things. So a good project manager could help keep things flowing along, as you know. And then Pooja brings along the experience of being a co-founder of a plugin company, and the mindset of what’s needed from that perspective as well. And she’s based in India. So really what might be fun to track is that we actually all do sleep.

Well, we’re on very different time zones. So we do what we can to make a time for us as a team to get together. We have an office hour that actually oddly works for all three of those time zones. I’m in the east coast of north America. So we span the globe where we can, and we continue to help the globe where we can too.

Robbie: Awesome. Yes, that’s no wonder why every time I go in that channel, there’s a new message for me to read. I’m like, “Wow, holy mackerel,” because you guys literally are working 24/7 when you distribute it that way. So that’s a really awesome, I really like that concept. Just thinking about that even for other distributed teams, marking leaders that are in such variety of time zones. That’s a cool idea, I like that.

Updating “Learn” with the release of the Full Site Editor

So we just had a big, big drop in the new release of Full Side Editing and things like that. So how did that cause chaos amongst the, oh my gosh, we’ve got to update things in Learn?

Courtney: Right. So great question. The training team, I would say, we have been around as a team making resources. We have a few content types that we have to evaluate any time an update happens. That would be lesson plans that a Meetup organizer or something like Girl Develop IT or a few other organizations have made use of our lesson plans to run their groups. So Meetup organizers are widely encouraged. Please come take this if you’re struggling for what to present to your group, you could use a lesson plan, and it tells you what to say and any exercises that go with that. Direct learners can go to the workshops area and view videos that are fairly brief about specific topics. And then we have courses as well. And the courses are probably the newest feature inside of Learn. And the courses actually will show on your wordpress.org profile.

You have to be logged in to go through the course. And they will show on your dot org profile that you have completed that course. And it’s a great way to dive deeply into a topic. And we had three courses roll out that were specific to full site editing in different phases of that. So it’s a combination of text, and videos, and links to appropriate resources. But it’s a really good way to evaluate like digging into the meat of what’s changing and what’s going on. And then we also have social learning spaces. And social learning spaces are actually organized through Meetup itself. So think of it like a more ad hoc kind of a Meetup group that happens. There are sessions almost every weekday going on. A lot of them right now are based out of north America, but again, we’re aspirational. We would like to have them run in multiple languages and around different time zones of things.

So all that to say, “Wow, there’s a lot of momentum happening.” Training team’s been around since 2014, Lauren launched around state of the word in 2020 officially. And since then, we’re definitely growing in our content. We’re doing more towards having content ready at release. So if you envision those four different types of content, and perhaps different audiences, then having material ready at release is new to our team. We have not previously had the expectation that maybe folks have had of Docs. I’m not saying the Docs sets the standard, but folks want material ready at release. And of course this is a contributor project. Everybody is welcome to come and participate and help get things ready. And to that effect, we’ll have some news in the near future, but we’re hoping to do an event soon where are those that are interested in contributing to 6 0 between Docs, which would .org/supportdeveloper.wordpress.org, if they’re interested in contributing to the marketing team around the promotionals and of identifying emerging FAQs for what’s going on in 6 0.

If they’re interested in contributing to training and the work that’s on Learn in any of those areas, perhaps a joint session where we all get together and we start with an idea of how do we assess what’s going to change? How does a new contributor figure out what’s going to come in 6, if we’re nowhere near having dev notes yet. And one of the big hints is, go read Gutenberg’s plugins change logs. It’s a great starting point.

Robbie: Oh, that’s a great tip. Okay, so we’ve just given everybody their nugget for the day in this podcast. I love it. Thanks Courtney. That’s great, yeah. Cool. Yeah. And we are also, at OSTraining, we’re also getting ready for some of the new things too. And you’re right, it is sometimes it’s like we, a lot of times don’t come out with our releases till after the release because we need them to come out and we don’t always have the time to go through all the release notes. Plus, there are some of those like changes that happen right before the release does happen, that if we’ve done all of our screen, because ours is all via video, so if we’ve done all of our screen captures, and then you have to go back, that’s a lot of work. And so we typically wait till after, but I love that Learn is trying to get all of these pieces, and it has a lot of moving pieces, all updated as soon as possible to the release. I love. It or coinciding with it. That’s fantastic.

Courtney: And partnering as closely as they can with other teams in that journey because we’re using WordPress TV. We need Docs to be our textbook basically before we turn it into the classroom instruction portions.

Thanks to our Pod Friends PeachPay & WP Activity Log

Movements on the certification program

Robbie: So tell me too, because I don’t know how far this is, this is one of the things that, one of the reasons why you and I got introduced to begin with, which is the thoughts of about going towards a certification type program. So can you give us any insights on what that might look like or when we might actually be starting some sort of beta?

Courtney: Progression towards that, yeah. So I would encourage folks to view, the easiest way for me to verbally tell you all the link, is if you go to make.wordpress.org/training, you’ll find a blue box called highlighted posts. And in there it has goals for 2022. The training team, about a dozen of us got together over three consecutive weeks, setting out our goals for this calendar year. And that does include, but not very specifically, including what are the content pieces, like what’s every lesson plan, course and things. Aside from that, a little bit higher level, what are we looking at for Learn? And so in that, we see for the month March, beginning phases would include, we’ve moved our project management from Trello to Github. So we’re still in the migration of that. If anyone’s joined our channel lately, I apologize ahead of time, we have been really noisy when we migrated everything. I’m sorry, Robbie, if you’re following in there, that was a day full of alerts.

Robbie: Yes, it was.

Courtney: Now that we’re done with that, we have other goals going on from month of March, starting with a rough draft of a needs analysis before the month ends. So a needs analysis, for those that aren’t familiar with instructional design or teaching, is basically saying what should be there, but asking more specific questions to pull out really good information. What should be there? In what order? What is the higher priority items? And then, from that needs analysis, we will be forming a way to outreach. We’re going to hopefully start up a curriculum advisory board, similar to the ways … I come from teaching at a bootcamp. And before that, teaching at a Voc Tech, a career technical school. So we have employers in the industry telling us what they needed.

What training community business owners need

And so along that same lines, this is a community initiative, so we want to hear from the community, what training would business owners need? What training do employers need? What training do those that do a lot of contracting or subcontracting need? And making sure that we’ve got that accounted for somewhere in the pipeline. Once we get through that, there will be a phase, I think it’s just discovery around Q4 this year, where we’re beginning the process of looking at certification. And I am the first to tell people, the first my WordPress certification came up, there was a very heated conversation. And I felt a little put on the spot. But that was me in 2015. And the WordPress community at that time was looking at who’s going to monitor it, who wants this, whatever? Fast forward to this year, and you look at the job ecosystem, there are lots of job postings. WordPress has grown exponentially in that time.

There’s a lot of development need going on, so that the plugin ecosystem that WooCommerce, that all of these things can also work in FSE. And the programming languages are evolving themselves, getting WordPress up to speed with PHP, 8 1, with PHP eight, all of those things are factors, as well as leaning in more towards JavaScript and React. And so that changes everything from senior devs through what you expect for entry support inside of larger product companies. So everybody has these jobs, and they need certain amounts of skill for these jobs. I was teaching at a bootcamp. And while at this bootcamp, I said, “I’ve worked four years previous to that in technical support at the events calendar and handling release communications.”

Here’s the minimum that I suggest for somebody that is going to do that or a junior entry dev. Because there was nothing official at this bootcamp to point them towards, they said, “Okay, we’ll include that.” Instead, what the students got was a walkthrough of an outdated underscores course, which was still good, but it taught them template hierarchy, and template tags, and PHP, but it was outdated a year ago and that’s what they were able to get. And they should have had more in PHP foundationally, so that they could be back compatible if they’re coming in as an entry dev. If they’re going to go into something that’s fancy headless React, cool. You still need to talk to the database. Even if you’re a front end dev, you need to know enough about how WordPress puts things into a database and pulls things out of a database. Even if everything’s happening over APIs, it still matters.

And I hear oftentimes from my friends that are devs in a headless environment more, they have to teach the WordPress way to their new staff. So if you factor all of that together and you look at well, why WordPress certification? Well, people need job jobs. There are jobs to be had. People need employees. Maybe they need to get the hiring thing figured out. And that intersection between an employer and any type of a training provider and saying, “Here’s what it means to be proficient, to be adequate, to be ready for this job. Here is what would be expected.” Having a common consensus, I think is going to rising tide, lift all ships. And so therein is why we’re pursuing it, and where things are headed with that. I am excited about doing the discovery phase and I really want this to be a community initiative. And I think that’s the same sentiment that everybody on the training team would have. This needs to come from the community.

Training materials for certification

Robbie: I totally agree with that. And I’ve been involved in other open source projects with their certification rollout, as well as my agency, we’ve done, more we were on the side of creating the training materials for certification tests out there. So I’ve kind of seen it from both sides. And I will say that as much as you want to have all of your training in place before you develop the certification test, when you start building that test, that pool of questions. And that really, because what you’re looking at is exactly what you said, you’re wanting to actually literally certify that this person has the fundamental knowledge to do X. Whatever that is. Develop, or maintain, or whatever. And so if we’re trying to say they had the fundamental knowledge, what is in the training may or may not exactly cover all of that, or it definitely doesn’t cover it in the way that it allow of them to learn it from there and answer a question.

And then of what we found, like when I worked in the other open source project too, the other thing that starts coming into play here, like usually my agency, we’re working on, let’s say US companies, it’s all in English. Once you start looking at an international community, now you start having to have translations made. There gets to be some loss. Like, did it really make sense in that language? And so then there’s questions on the correct answer and it becomes, it’s a big job. It’s a very big job to create certifications. But I am with you. I wholeheartedly believe in them. And who better to certify than the community itself? And so I that it’s great that WordPress is looking at having a certification. I know you can go to other places and you can come to US training and do courses and get a certificate. Or you can go other places and you can do their courses. And they may even say you have a certification or whatever.

But having a certification from WordPress will mean a lot for people. But It’s going to mean more word for Learn. Sorry, but it’s going to happen. As soon as that test comes out, it’s going to be like, “Yeah, we need to do some training tutorials on this so that people understand this question.”

Courtney: Sure. Yeah. And along the way, areas that the team has elevated to be important, include learning from other open source projects what has worked and what has not worked, learning from other web development organizations that have some form of certification, whether proprietary or not, what has worked, what hasn’t worked. Looking at things like there may be different types of certification, not just a blanket WordPress certification, but a certification that might indicate something like some places call it happiness engineers, or care guides, or technical support, what have you, the role of answering customers questions and tickets. What’s proficient for that, and maybe different tiers, even. What would be a designer pathway, what would be a developer pathway? What might be, you need, if it’s somebody that’s working in DevOps, but they need a certain proficiency and WordPress, well, what does that look like?

And it’s big and it grows, and then you factor in, I myself am about 45 minutes from where you can only get internet by dial up still. I’m near Gettysburg. But we have to have folks that are pulling in information from a cyber cafe in remote locations, and then heading back to their home to view the materials. Exponentially, and something I have absolutely loved seeing happen, is that Alex Stein, who is the accessibility team rep, one of the team reps for accessibility team, and also a DevOps engineer at Kinsta, has taken a real strong interest in what’s going on at Learn. And Alex does not have any vision. So Alex has been logging some accessibility tickets already. And we have things in the works eventually, like having GlotPress, which for those unfamiliar, there are a couple ways that WordPress sites can handle low counts. One of them is with a tool called Rosetta.

So if you were in the UK, you would get served a slightly different version of wordpress.org than what we see. If you were in Spain, or in parts of South America, everything would be in a different locale. So Rosetta does that. That’s not going to be a good solution long term for things. So eventually on the roadmap, it’s having a full content translation available of the material on Learn. And we have a wonderful problem where after this release, because Learn was linked to right in the about page, lots of people have showed up in the channel is that I’m already starting to translate this into this other language. Where can we put this?

Robbie: Wow.

Courtney: So we’re working on it.

Robbie: That’s awesome though. That’s great news to hear that.

Courtney: Yeah.

Robbie: In any community, you can get stuck in the Twitter noise sometimes, or some of the grumblings, but it’s always so nice just to hear the positive side of things, and the way that the community does come together when they need to. And that’s fantastic. Yeah, it will be interesting. And this is what I always find with CMSs to do something like a certification, is you really, like you said, what all do they need to know? Well, you can’t create a certification that’s outside of core. And that’s what I’ll call it, outside of core. You’re not going to do one that’s one, a certain type of a plugin because this is just about WordPress at the core, or anything that’s Automattic.

I’m going to say that, if you think it’s Automattic. But a lot of people don’t always use that. And that was what we found in the other CMS is, let’s say we one, multilingual is a great example. If we had questions about multilingual set up, they could be experts. They could be devs that have written extensions, or plugins, or whatever. And they were like, “I don’t know. I’ve never had to have that. I’ve never had to do that at the core level,” even though it was always there. So there are core features, same in the WordPress world. There’s core features. And even now that we’ve got full site editing, not everyone is using it, not everyone be using it immediately. And so if you start testing someone’s proficiency on WordPress on whether they know full side editing or not, they can, again, be an expert, but they may not know full side editing yet.

Robbie: And so it becomes a very tricky balance with certification. And I think where you were talking about who needs it and what it’s for, dividing your certifications down to smaller certifications is going to be key. And that was what I couldn’t win. That was a battle I couldn’t win in another one where it was just, it was so broad. And I was like, it’s just so broad. And it’s very difficult to pass. It was a very difficult certification test to pass because of that. So I think parsing that down will give people the ability to be more honed in on their certifications too. And I love that taking the courses shows up on people’s profiles. And I’m assuming certification badges will too, perhaps

Courtney: We may not call it, so in WordPress, inside of wordpress.org culture, we have the term badge reserved for those that are contributing specifically to teams. So there will be something on your profile that indicates if you’ve gotten the certification, whatever that something is labeled may not be badge, but maybe it will. I don’t know.

Robbie: I’m going to throw out certification seal.

Courtney: There you go. I like that.

Robbie: Yeah. I’m going to just throw that out there. We’ll see.

Courtney: But you’re on the right track, yeah. I think being able to chunk it down, and then something I’ve been kicking around, but I should probably write a real actual proposal for this, is that if you think about it from the employer’s side, the employer wants then, if somebody is applying for a job that wants that certification, I need to find out from other open source communities, and anyone really, how am the places that want that certification can accent the data of if somebody has or not. Right now, it would be a visual check. Go find their do org profile and look at it, ask for that on the application. But could we see a way of fetching that data into systems? That could be kind of fun. There’s a lot of other higher priorities right now, but when we get to that spot in the process, yes. For sure.

And those that are taken part already in other open source projects, you are high on my radar for folks that when we get to that creating a survey type of question and thinking it through, very high on the priority of folks to learn from. I will say too, that you can find other content across Learn that is not exclusive to just the vanilla WordPress. By that I mean, if you want to build a five page website, going need a contact form. If you would like to sell something on your website, since we’re talking to the Woo folks, there will be content, whether it’s all there or not. There’s a little bit there right now. But we have some basic guidelines so that we are fairly impartial in the information that’s delivered. You need a contact form. Cool. Here are a lot of contact form options.

We’re going to teach you this one method, but if you want a different form, here’s a link to go find the other forms. To be representative of the folks in the third party ecosystem in a way that is fair, and at the same time, pick something and do something at least with that information.

Robbie: Yeah, absolutely.

Products acquired from Automattic become part of the Learn ecosystem

And you mentioned it, and that was actually what I was going to ask you next is, are there plans since Woo falls under Automattic, we’ve got WooCommerce, WooPayments now, and of course, MailPoet. So will those become part of the Learn ecosystem just as a core?

Courtney: Right. So originally, when I started kicking around an idea, and I say I a lot, but please know in my heart of hearts that I have talked about this with other team reps. I have talked about this with the team. One of the other things that we have considered is initially, let’s make sure if we’re going to start calling in employers to represent and give a voice to what they need, let’s equally ask both Woo and EDD folks, tell us some information about what you need. There could be some times where one would be the preferred solution, and times where the other would be a preferred solution. So playing nicely, even throughout our system, yes, I think that you would see a lot of that. What we do have is our basic guideline is right now, everything must be available that we mention or refer to freely through the dot org Rico.

Because if anybody wants to follow that training material and do that thing, they need to be able to access it without asking for some test license or something like that. So it needs to be free. It needs to follow the GPL. It needs to be in dot org. And from there, there’s a lot still that could be learned.

Robbie: Cool. Yeah. We used to only do the free versions of things too, but then we have expanded in the last two years too. We will have the first part of our courses will cover the free, but then we will actually dig into more paid features, just telling the students that these are paid features that we’re about to cover. And they don’t have to purchase it. They should watch it first, but then they can see if they need it or not. And so not that Learn needs to do that. Learn, I do believe you are right that it should stay with the free components so that everyone can follow along. I think that’s a good thing to do. So, many exciting things there. And I just want to point out again, because you flew through it at the beginning, but there are different parts for different people. There’s just stuff for devs, there’s stuff for new learners, there’s something for everyone out there. And so everyone needs to get involved.

Getting involved on the Learn team

And so I’m going to have you just kind of go through that again. One more time of just where people should look, and if they want to get involved on the Learn team, what should they do?

Courtney: Okay. The Learn team, behind it is the training team. Make.WordPress.org/training. We have links there for everything.

And you could swing through the training team teams blog post called a P2, if you’re familiar with WordPress contributors. So that would be our little home where all the documents are. And we have links to our Slack channel there and all kinds of things. We also have links if developers want to develop. Developers are welcome to help us create content. We really need help with things. We would like to, can you imagine all of our lesson plans what to learn right now, sit in a blog archive.

Robbie: Wow.

Courtney: Reverse chronological order. That doesn’t make sense.

Robbie: No.

Courtney: Dear developers, if you were itching to develop in a way that helps other people learn stuff, please come and help us wire frame up some things and maybe develop some code that will help us have a more logical journey. Matt has referred to that as a choose your own adventure. And so we have a rough table. It’s literally just a table that I made that people could go through in a slightly sequential order. But if you would like to help us assemble this information in more of a logical flow for how people learn, we would love to work with a developer for that. So come over to the training teams make site, and you can find links for that. The types of learners that come to the site to learn the polished product, learn.WordPress.org. That could be, we have a couple content types. Lesson plans, good for someone that is going to be teaching or presenting to other. It’s basically all of your research done for you.

And we would almost consider this the foundation of the other types, because before you make a workshop video type two, you want to have done some research into that topic, so the research is done for you. So workshop videos, and we have quite a few of those popping through in additional languages. So our workshop videos are aiming for around five minutes, sometimes they go a bit longer. But a workshop video would be a short video version that ideally is directed at the individual learner. So a lesson plan is for someone that’s presenting or teaching to others. A workshop video is direct learner. A course is, I want to through this more deeply, and I may not do it all in one sitting. And then social learning spaces, you could find those also in every WordPress admin dashboard, if you still have your events and your upcoming events widget displayed in the WordPress dashboard. It will show you your nearby events. We’re starting to do those again.

And it will show you topical events that are happening for Meetup and Zoom, but are attached to Learn.wordpress.org. So they’re called social learning spaces, all types of different topics. And anyone that would like to facilitate those as well is welcome to come over. You could either check out the training team site or learn.wordpress.org/contribute, learn.wordpress.org/contribute. A good place to check.

Robbie: And speaking of contributing, I want to give a shout out to GoDaddy for letting you, they’re using five for the future the way it’s supposed to be used, letting you spend some of your time on their dollar to work on WordPress. So thank you very much, GoDaddy. And because I know you’re a dev advocate, and I know you guys are out there hunting hot and heavy, so tell people what are you looking for and what should they do to get your attention?

Courtney: Yeah. So my role at GoDaddy Pro as a dev advocate is advocating for those who are building sites for clients. There are lots of parts of GoDaddy. Oh my gosh, I didn’t know how big GoDaddy was until I joined our company Slack. Whoa. So we have a lot of things going on at GoDaddy. Even GoDaddy Pro, as part of Adam Warner’s team, a lot of Do the Woo folks know both Maya and Marcus Burnett as well. So that’s my little immediate team, along with Sandy Edwards of kids camp. And Ken Crockett just joined us recently. I am the one right now as a dev advocate. My role is to continue advocating our customers that are building sites for clients need such and such. Also, I wear the same hat as it relates to wordpress.org. If people have concerns about what’s happening with WordPress, there’s a team of folks that are developer advocates like myself and multiple companies. And we’re kind of working together, trying to help get people to raise the issues where they need to go. Traveling soon to word camps coming near you, hopefully I’ll be at all of the ones going on in June, but we’ll see. I think June’s my earliest events in person.

Robbie: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Courtney. It’s been a great discussion. And I know we’re going to be wanting you to come back on, especially as we start talking about certification or other things start growing in Learn. We are going to want you to come back on and talk about it. And maybe we can have the three of you, the three leads on here. That would be fantastic. If we could find that one hour that coordinates between all of you

Courtney: That hour, the earlier in the US time that we could have that hour, because Pooja often stays up until about midnight for our team meeting. So let’s try very early in the morning. That would be ideal.

Robbie: All right. We will sort that out. We’ll get Bob on that. Bob will fix it. All right. Thank you so much. And we will talk to you again.