One of the major concerns often raised by SME - Enterprise customers who are interested to adopt ERPNEXT is the pool of skill available. And this needs to be addressed.
The foundation needs to address this. One way to tackle this might be to provide certification or digital badges based on github contributions + forum postings + case studies / functional analysis publications or anything that increases and strengthens the free official knowledge base of the foundation.
We could have a basic certification program for the rest who are just interested to learn and be users. And might see a certification as a + on the cv. This can perhaps be monetized by the foundation
My concern is only to increase the pool of skill out there and how to achieve it
@vivek I am not sure certification will solve the problem.
Ultimately it will be based on resources. Right now most of the community seems not to be able to invest a lot into hiring devs. Free is the reason they want ERPNext the first place . I think this will change naturally as time progresses and as the project gets more popular (and more people start saying they provide ERPNext services).
Its a chicken-and-egg problem that can be fixed by everyone being more vocal about ERPNext in their individual forums.
that hopefully will be so, but I could imagine one (and maybe that’s a task the Foundation might considering to pursue) can do much to help developing the Community so there will be more and more (high quality) code contributions coming from that side. My personal opinion … every $ well invested into such efforts (encouraging & enabling Community coding contributions) might return code of a larger monetary value then the sum invested.
I certainly believe this is an important topic which I trust the new Foundation Executive Board will have as an early topic.
One possible idea would be to have the Foundation come to an arrangement with one of the MANY for-profit companies who provide training and certifications for any number of technologies for a fee.
Although we would all like to have a free education/certification process, we are more likely to find some partner willing to invest the time and resources needed to develop a robust program if they can monetize it. Of course, this would not limit the community’s ability to develop an alternative as well, but it could help an effort like this to move along much faster than waiting for volunteers to do it.
I am working on a project here in Orlando with the University of Central Florida to develop a training and certification program with the help of the University. I already have a “green light” from the right department heads and we will be working on the details over the school year.
When these efforts are further along I will post information about our progress and involve the Community as well.
. I think this will change naturally as time progresses and as the project gets more popular (and more people start saying they provide ERPNext services).