An IT university student asked me one week before in a developer meetup here in Thessaloniki - Greece:

"Senior developers say to never count on a CMS to build a career. I have heard that Drupal 8.x is more mature than ever but how risky it is to spend my time on a hard to learn CMS in order to make a living? What is your advise as a Drupal developer?"

First of all I would like to say that it is a very hard question. If you are already using Drupal the answer may be obvious but here we are talking about a young person studying IT, who doesn’t have any real experience on any CMS, and would be afraid to rely on a specific CMS. This is expected and totally fine.

Secondly, in order to be more objective I should compare Drupal with the other similar software out there like WordPress, Joomla, SiteCore, SquareSpace, Adobe AEM etc. Or, to be honest I should compare Drupal with other the alternative frameworks like Laravel, Django, Ruby on Rails etc. Since I do not have a personal experience of all the above "competitors" I will talk only about Drupal. So it's up to you, the young IT Student to investigate if similar software out there can offer what Drupal offers and how much does it cost to focus or not to Drupal.

Thirdly I would say that I make a living from Drupal for the last 8 years now as a freelancer. I work from home and I work 100% on Drupal projects.

So, here is why Drupal is a very good path to follow in order to build a long time career.

 

Open Source:

This may be a "hidden" advantage of Drupal but notice this: with Drupal you and your customers will never stand behind a company, a commercial license or a company strategic. Behind Drupal there are thousand of people and this is your stable ground to step. Behind any commercial software there is a company. Drupal is open source and will stay as that for ever. Remember that.

 

Ready for tomorrow:

Drupal is not a "static" code CMS, outdated and heavy. Drupal is always "regenerated" and stays on the edge of the technology. Current version of 8.x is built with Backbone.js, RESTful services, In Place Editor, Symfony2, Twig, CKeditor and many other things that are game-changers. It's UX is always improved. You may have difficulties to get started and the learning curve will not be easy. But it worths the effort. Drupal is a CMS that never stagnates.

 

Career Evolution:

Using and building experiences with Drupal is challenging. On every release you are almost forced to learn new things. That's because Drupal tries to get better and better over time even after 15 years of existence. For Drupal 8.x for example you may need to learn to use Composer, Object Oriented patterns, RESTful APIs, Symfony services and many other interesting things which were not in Drupal 7.x. Nowadays Drupal is adding new stuff in its core even on minor releases of 8.x. I can really promise, "you will never get borrowed with DrupalTM".

 

Companies are investing:

Huge, medium and small companies investing to Drupal. IT companies and advertisement agencies are moving to Drupal as their preferable tool to create websites or other apps. Big corporations, organizations, governments, institutes etc are using Drupal or planning to use Drupal to build their web presence. In terms of the open source CMS Drupal is by far a leader when there are security, flexibility and long term maintenance requirements. Especially for Drupal 8.x we are going to see even more "big" players to investigate on Drupal and migrate from other CMS - even paid -. Drupal creates new market opportunities and that's why demand for Drupal talent is great​.

 

Drupal Community:

Drupal is very proud of its' incredibly unique community. The motto of Drupal is "Come for the Code, Stay for the Community". It is the key for success of the software. The Drupal.org website, the unified and fully open online place where Drupal lives, is full of helpful information, extensions, themes, documentation and thousands of humans ready to help you find your way. People are giving back to Drupal and this is a win win situation. I could say so many about Drupal community and how it works but you should better see on your self.

 

Drupal Association:

Behind (or in front of) Drupal there is the Drupal Association, a passionate group of people elected from the community and working for the community. The Drupal Association is dedicated to fostering and supporting the Drupal software project, the community and its growth (funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution, online collaboration etc). So behind the community there is the same community trying to help the community! Probably the larger online community of an open source software.

 

Dries:

I could not avoid refer to the founder of Drupal. Dries is one of us, a humble community member, an open mind businessman, a lead developer, a Drupal evangelist, a restless leader. His thoughts are really inspiring and you feel safe when you listen him talking about the mission and strategic of Drupal.

 

After all these I hope you get the idea.

Good luck with your professional (Drupal) career ;-)

 

Further reading.