Working Professionally with Umbraco

As a certified Umbraco gold partner we at byte5 offer various certification courses for web editors and developers who want to qualify for their work on the ASP.NET based open source CMS in order to improve their results or to stand out against competitors. In doing so we are the only partner to carry out courses in German for Umbracians in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Trainer for our next courses is byte5 Umbraco Guru Sören Deger. In our interview he explains about the course content and how the attendees benefit from the various certifications.

Depending on the attendee’s previous experience, there are different options for Umbraco training. First, there’s the Fundamentals class that allows easy access to Umbraco for web editors and everyone who starts working with the system in two training days. For those who want to look further into the CMS there are several one-day courses that specialise on MVC and Visual Studio, backend editing using AngularJS as well as application integration. Those are addressed at web developers who need further specialisation. Since we tend to combine all trainings in one week it’s usually possible to book the whole package.

That’s true. In Umbraco HQ they had been looking for a way to reward all the hard-workers who are taking all of the courses and to offer better packages in order to motivate more people to specialise. What resulted from that was the point system. You get 100 points for finishing the Fundamentals class, and 50 points each for all the others. So actually, you can calculate 50 points per completed day of training. The result of the new system that there are now three categories of Umbraco developers. Certified Professional (100 points and more), Certified Expert (200 points and more) and Certified Master (those who completed everything). And since we at byte5 are the only gold and training partner in Germany, the rules apply to all of our trainings as well.

The focus in our Fundamentals training is especially on Umbraco basics, like defining content types, creating content, storing HTML templates, creating multilingual projects and simple forms for user interaction. This course gives you a kind of continuity that helps you to work with the system and it is the basis that everyone needs. In the MVC course we work with the five controller types you need in order to develop different applications as well as with the implementation of WebAPI controllers and the usage and extension of several event handlers in Umbraco. The AngularJS course is about extending the Umbraco backend especially by adding own controls and custom sections. And finally, in the application integration training we use a specific example project to show how an existing web shop can be implemented in Umbraco using MVC.

Basically, they do. Still it always depends on individual previous experience, so that the different categories Professional, Expert and Master are quite well chosen. If someone with solid experience in HTML and CSS completes the Fundamentals class, he will definitely be able to create his first project with Umbraco without bumping into too many hurdles. For someone with no previous experience in programming languages it will, however, be definitely possible to use Umbraco as an editor. After the developer courses things are looking a little different: in those trainings developers who have been using Umbraco for some time learn how to add certain functions in order to improve your daily work. Anyone who visits our courses with a certain project in mind will, however, also find help and tipps for any specific questions he might have.

For many attendees certification means taking a first step into the world of Umbraco and at the same time evidence of a professional achievement – for instance if you want to show your customers that you know what you’re doing with Umbraco or if you want to stand out against competitors. After all, there are only about two dozens of certified companies and a little more than 60 professionals who have achieved certification so far in Germany.

Anyone who has completed a course is listed on the Umbraco website in his individual category. This includes that you are allowed to add your official title and badge to business cards or an own website. Additionally, every attendee can access the training videos on umbraco.tv for free in the three months after completion, so that anything that was or wasn’t in the courses can be repeated at any time.

Sören Deger has been on the byte5-team since 2014. He works as an Umbraco developer, trainer as well as a project manager and is thus one of Germany's leading Umbraco Gurus. He is a qualified IT specialist and application developer and mastered correspondence courses in web design and C#. That the CMS he has worked with ever since 2010 is more than a job is shown by the fact that he also develops and designs Umbraco projects for customers after work.

Our trainers at byte5 offer all current Umbraco courses for German-speaking attendees. You can find and book upcoming courses here. If you need to find courses in English our partners at Umbraco will be glad to help you out.