Last weeks was very intense for us. We have just finished of our first Meet Magento Academy edition. We are hopeful that this new initiative, launched five weeks ago, will be as valuable and essential as we planned it to be.

Why do we do it?

The whole idea behind the MM Academy adventure is to attract more young people to the Magento ecosystem and familiarize them with the community. As many experienced developers would say, Magento is not an easy way to make your living. But it is challenging, gives a lot of satisfaction, and leads into the world of big eCommerce.

On the HR market, all Magento agencies would love to hire Senior Magento Developers and experienced ninjas. However, all ninjas were juniors once, and all of us started our Magento adventure from the first line of the code. These days, once you begin working with Magento, there are plenty of ways to increase your knowledge. Now that more of us are experienced with Magento, there are more coaches, more training sessions, and more conferences available (including our Meet Magento Poland!). So, there are currently a number of ways developers can benefit from the Magento community.

However, it is still quite difficult to start from scratch. This is why we decided to create a program that would bring basic knowledge about different aspects of Magento to people who want to get involved.

How do we do it?

The program we prepared is divided into five meetings (once a week).

  • Magento 2 installation and configuration by Maciej Kalkowski from Centuria
  • Magento admin panel by Anna Krzyżańska (@Wybrakowana) from Snowdog
  • Backend (part 1) by Kamil Balwierz (@mamut144) from Snowdog
  • Backend (part 2) by Kamil Balwierz (@mamut144) from Snowdog
  • Frontend by Bartek Igielski (@igloczek) from Snowdog

We scheduled each meeting for four hours. After the first one, however, we realized more time was needed to cover everything we had planned in the course. We also decided to have additional help on hand for all meetings, not just for the large group (we had planned to use an assistant to help with the installation process and configuration details with one group of more than 10 people).

What do we do next?

After this first edition, we received a lot of great feedback from students. We learned where to improve each meeting, and how to make it all work smoother and easier. The great news is that the next edition of Meet Magento Academy will take place at UAM (Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza) during the winter semester of academic year 2017/2018, and it is officially part of the ECTS point system!

This is a big success, but the hard work is still ahead. We have to adjust our program to meet the academic needs, prepare more materials for students to work on, get back to the idea of “homework” (sic!), and develop a summary test for students to pass.

We are very excited about this new challenge. In February, Meet Magento Academy was just an idea. Today, we have not only finished the first edition, but also managed to bring our program to a new level. We are looking forward to meeting more and more Magento newbies. Welcome, and happy coding!