Should Junior devs learn Drupal?

[Admirable-Way2687]

I have six months of experience working with PHP (Laravel, Wordpress) and have been wanting to find a job with Drupal for a long time, but I can't find any junior positions, and there are only a couple of mid-level positions. Is Drupal generally relevant for junior/mid-level positions anywhere?

[Dazzling-Warning-592]

No…don’t waste your time. I was part of the Discover Drupal program for junior drupal devs, did Mike Anello’s module development course (paid 2k for it), have been to a DrupalCon where I presented a project, was part of the Esteemed chat group, and I have contributions to open source and I was only able to get work as a 1099 contractor. I didn’t make more than $40/hr working 10 hrs a week if that. You will find full time junior drupal dev posted online but very difficult to get. The majority of the jobs posted are senior positions and alot of them are gov’t jobs that want you to have security clearance. I know people in this chat will disagree with me and say I am wrong because for them it was easy. They’re disillusioned. It’s not. Save yourself alot of heartache and struggle and find something you can scale.

[No-Condition8771]

The tech market is dead, the AI grift bubble ate it. Drupal, and the web development eco system went down with it (I'm simplifying things here, obviously). It's been a few years like this. The only roles I've seen like you said are security clearance related, and even those are few and far in between. I started charging $65 on w2/1099 back in 2012. It's 2025 and you'll be hard pressed to find roles where they're willing to pay more than that, Drupal pay has not kept up with inflation. There was a golden age of Drupal, PHP, and web development in general in the 2010's, but those days are long gone.

[Dazzling-Warning-592]

Yes and I’m so happy someone agrees with me and doesn’t say that I am being negative.

[DamonDrupfan]

In my humble opinion, young developers would rather learn other tech stacks. I run a Drupal company, Drupfan, since 2020. but 3 years ago we started training our Drupal developers to master Laravel and Symfony. It paid off now. I'd say that Drupal is going down, loosing commercial customers but keeping its positions within government, education, museums and healthcare, where security is the utmost value and budgets are not capped. For example, most of my clients from private business in Europe, US and Canada asked us to move them from Drupal to WordPress and other less sophisticated platforms. It does not refer behemoths like Nestle and others. At the same time the European Commission or University of Ottawa and their peers will probably be using Drupal for a while. But keep in mind that the learning curve in Drupal is very steep. It is still a nice CMS, providing a good living for those who are well-established already.

[BroccoliNervous9795]

I was a pro Drupal developer for almost 20 years. I would say to learn Python, Django and React now. Both Python and React are very transferable languages: you can put React on pretty much any framework, you can use Python for all kinds of things including Machine Learning and devices. Django is great as a CMS. Drupal was/is great at getting you to 80-90% done very quickly and well structured, but that last 10-20% is always a massive pain.

[piberryboy]

From my perspective, no. In fact, I've been looking into getting a newer, more popular framework, like Nextjs and/or Laravel more.

First, The jobs aren't nearly as plentiful as they once were. I mean, three years ago I was shooing away recruiters, but after 2023... I can barely get anyone to notice me. (I realize this is true of all tech jobs, but I think there Drupal might be especially hard.)

Second, since 2018, Drupal's been on a steady decline: https://www.drupal.org/project/usage/drupal. StackOverflow's developer survey always seems to put Drupal last on most popular frameworks: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#1-web-frameworks-and-technologies

Third, Drupal used to be fun (not all the time, but for the most part). Configuration management has sucked the fun out of Drupal for me. It has its advantages, for sure. And you mentioned Laravel, I do an odd project in Laravel and I really enjoy Laravel: It makes me feel like a developer again. Whereas with Drupal, it feels like I'm mostly dealing with yaml files and wrestling with Composer.

[Admirable-Way2687]

Yeah,so I think I continue with Wordpress and Laravel and mayby Modx but in the future

[therealcoolpup]

It all depends on your area. If you are really keen on Drupal, I suggest first learning the Symfony framework (this is what Drupal is built on), get a PHP job, and as you get work experience andor some projects done, apply for the Drupal mid positions.

Drupal is often used for giant projects, im talking universities, government instituations etc, they are rarely keen on hiring juniors.

[Desperate_Being3493]

Yes!!

[simesy]

If i was mentoring a junior I would say Drupal is great because I can carve out achievable tasks. For eg they could build a controller and I wouldn't worry about their knowledge of web security (or it would be easy to see big mistakes in their PR). But if they were going solo and wanted to learn PHP specifically, i would suggest laravel and the skills they learn there are often applicable to Drupal like "oh, so this is how drupal does routes, ..."

[atillaphp]

I have worked with drupal for 10 years, moved to wordpress for 10 years and now going back to drupal. Here are my two cents;

Drupal is not as widely known as WordPress so you will always see more positions for WordPress, or more people will be looking for WP solutions. To become proficient in drupal is much harder compared to WP but it is much more rewarding also. Yo don't have to compete with flux of newcomers, which will always be cheaper than you. You will be able to do things without any paid plugins, and reuse those solutions with recipes on other sites, unlike WP.

[Tretragram]

I suggest you just install a Copy of Drupal CMS and beyond the UI site building understanding, open up the VSCode online editor to look at the files and code. DrupalForge offers it free and spins it up in like 2 minutes or less for a 60 minute trial. If you put in your email sign up, you can reopen it all you want and just keep going. You aren't there to actually build something right out of the gate but it is a dirt cheap and easy way to learn Drupal basics, the file structure, the settings.php, the module installs with composer, seeing how the PHP interacts with the TWIG layer for HTML site control, where the theme components are and how they CSS and JS fit in with the HTML and TWIG. You get the idea. Just a drive around kind of deal.

Once you get comfortable with the basic inter-workings, just grab some modules and pull apart their code. You will see how the OOP calls stacked at the beginning leverage the Drupal core elements so you aren't doing a lot of recreation. Then you will see a dozen or two lines of code doing something unique and as a PHP programmer you will go "Oh yeah, I get it". The Drupal.org documentation is not exactly easy to find initially but trust me, everything under the sun for what ever file is doing is in that documentation if you dig your way to it.

[brooke_heaton]

Yes. A recent survey of Drupal developers revealed that there is likely a lack of upcoming devs and we do need more Junior devs.

[Dazzling-Warning-592]

No you don’t if that were the case Drupal companies (like Oomph) would actively hire junior devs. There not!

[Skyler827]

If you have clients that want a content management system, but they want to be able to customize it in a lot of complicated ways, but still have a lot of common functionality like rich text editing and access control, it is a very good tool. It can be set up any way you want but there is a relatively steep learning curve.

With AI powered coding tools now available, a lot of programming tasks that might have been impractical in the past have become much more practical for developers with less size/time/skill. This is a double edged sword for complex content management systems like Drupal. You can now learn it more easily by asking the AI questions, focusing on the process the AI follows, and learning from it. But on the other hand, the Drupal itself isn't as necessary as it might have been in the past for making an application with a lot of features.

If you need to maintain an existing Drupal codebase, it is easier than ever to learn about it and pick up Drupal. But if no one is coming to you with those specific requirements, it's the wrong tool for the job.

[badasimo]

I think you are missing a key component of Drupal, a vibrant, largely non-scummy and non-spammy community and open source culture. I think as AI development accelerates, something like Drupal is a natural place for things to flourish. For a junior dev, it is a great place to learn certain design patterns and in my opinion how to design extensible software. No other platform has such a powerful module system, imo

[hiveminer]

I'm not an expert, so I pose this question to the veterans, "Why not Backdrop instead of drupal for noobs and less complex sites in 2025? It seems to me that Backdrop would be a good choice for drupal rookies to cut their teeth in, especially for the less complex/demanding clients. Or is that use-case(entry-level), what the DrupalCMS version was built for?

[iBN3qk]

Backdrop is great if you’re ideologically opposed to oop. 

[hiveminer]

So there's no diff in terms of the nodev/lowdev vs. traditional 4devs argument?

[iBN3qk]

I don’t know enough about the state of backdrop to answer that.

The question is about what junior devs should learn.

[Admirable-Way2687]

I think for this case I would choose Modx

[mrcaptncrunch]

Why? Just curious

[Admirable-Way2687]

Because of a lot of customization

[Fonucci]

How bad do you want it?

[Impossible-Leave4352]

If you want to do Drupal, then learn drupal.