Should You Learn Magento 2 Development in 2023?

E commerce continues to grow and evolve, businesses are looking for devs with experience to build and maintain their online store, and the most known and popular open source e commerce platform is Magento2. But with its framework complexity and lack of available training resources, it can be daunting to learn. This raises the question, is it really worth investing all the time and effort to learn Magento 2 in 2023? Even if you are familiar with PHP and have experience with e commerce systems, Magento is just a different beast. The complex architecture coupled with the development process makes it difficult for new developers to learn, and the framework has a much steeper learning curve when compared to other frameworks. This can make it challenging to learn and you're probably wondering whether you should even bother with it. Despite all of this, there is an extremely high demand for Magento 2 developers. E commerce hasn't stopped growing and the lack of experience challenges challengers in the open source e commerce space still makes Magento a very attractive option to merchants. So is it worth learning? Here are some really solid points which I think will help make up your mind. Ever since Magento got released, even back to the Magento one days over a decade ago, it's been hard to find developers. A major concern of merchants is where is the available top talent to hire. It's hard to hire top talent anywhere in tech, and Magento is no exception. Magento 2 is a complex and nuanced framework that requires a deep understanding of the platform and its architecture. Because of this, there just aren't as many developers in the Magento 2 space compared to other platforms such as Shopify. All of those benefits of other frameworks that make it easy to use compared to Magento. This ease of use also makes it easy to learn, and if it's easy to learn, that means it's much harder to stand out in a much larger pool of available developers. Let's say Framework ABC is very easy to learn is more Cookie Cutter has thousands of storefronts and there are 100 developers knowledgeable about it and available to hire because the barrier of entry was so low. Then you also have Framework xyz. It's more difficult to learn, but provides an extreme amount of customization and flexible options. There are only 100 storefronts and only five developers available who really knew their stuff about it because it was more complex and harder to learn. Magento is definitely framework XYZ, but has over 100,000 available sites with an available talent pool in the hundreds. This scarcity of great developers with experience with Magento 2 makes it so hard to find available top talent, especially talent knowing the intricate details of a framework like Magento. When I was in charge of hiring developers at an agency, there were many applicants who seemed to have a lot of experience on paper, but interviewed extremely poorly. People interviewing for architect positions didn't even know what dependency injection was. So if you know PHP or are willing to learn it and learn Magento, you'll enter a very selective group of developers and can much more easily become a standout among your peers. Because this pool of available top talent is just so much smaller, the scarcity of experienced developers presents a unique opportunity. So if you're a rock solid PHP developer, are willing to become one and wondering if you can get a job in Magento, and this is what you need to know. A solid foundational knowledge of the platform and decent interviewing capabilities will put you in a very exclusive group of developers. And it'll be much easier to become a standout because the pool of available talent is much smaller than with other frameworks. Because of this lack of talent, there is still an extremely high demand of Magento developers in 2023. The fairly recent acquisition of Magento by Adobe has further increased demand for Magento developers. Adobe's focus on the enterprise market has caused Magento to move upstream, but this isn't a bad thing at all for developers looking for a Magento job. This move has increased the demands of those in the enterprise market, making it even harder to find knowledgeable developers in a scaled up solution. As businesses grow, they want their storefront to grow with them, so businesses are increasingly looking to scale up their Magento storefronts. This has caused increased demand and has created competition among businesses looking to hire developers. This makes it a lot harder to find available top talent, especially Magento talent. The competition among businesses to hire top talent has led to an increase in salary and benefits for Magento developers. According to salary.com the average salary of a Magento developer in December of 2022 was about $121,000 a year, with a typical range between 112 and $130,000. These are of course US figures, but if we even compare this to an average PHP developer job of roughly $69,000, the differences are significant. And it even beat a senior PHP developer average salary as well as the salary of that other really popular PHP framework. And these are just the average developer jobs. Experienced senior Magento developers can command $160,000 or more. With architect jobs reaching the $200,000 level, merchants and agencies are willing to pay a premium to attract and retain top talent, making it a very lucrative career option for developers with the necessary skills and experience. But those skills and experience are not easy to learn. If you've liked this video so far, remember to hit that like button to spread the word to other Magento developers. I appreciate it. It's so difficult to find Magento developers because it's more complex than other e commerce platforms and requires a much deeper understanding of the platform. This creates a fairly steep learning curve for new developers as it requires a much higher level of expertise and knowledge of the inner workings of the architecture. There are fewer resources and tutorials available for Magento 2 compared to other e commerce platforms. The lack of resources and tutorials can make it harder for developers to learn and it can take much longer to become proficient in Magento 2 development. But despite the steeper learning curve and lack of resources, the the high level of expertise and knowledge required for Magento to development presents an opportunity to developers looking to specialize in open source e commerce. This can make them highly valuable in the job market and push them into a much higher earning potential. For developers Interested in learning Magento 2, it's important to understand that it takes time and effort to become proficient in this platform, but with dedication and persistence and it's very possible to level up your skills and become one of those senior Magento 2 developers within just a couple years. It's also important to take advantage of any resources and tutorials that are available to help you learn the platform, especially ones that are up to date and created by knowledgeable Magento developers. If you don't already know this, I noticed this learning curve gap quite a while ago and decided to do something about it. So I spent the last few years building up the Magento 2 training resources I wish I had when I started Magento 2 development. This includes the Magento 2 coding kickstart course which can really help jumpstart your career and save you so much time learning the platform, as well as a variety of other related Magento courses that can help you become well rounded in all of the different areas of the framework. If you are really serious about becoming a Magento developer, there's also the University option which includes access to all current and future Magento courses as well as Campus, which is a premium social community just for Magento development calibers. Over 500 active university students from all over the world say nothing but good things about it, so be sure to check out McAdemy for all your Magento learning and training needs as I mentioned before learning Magento can also lead to some really great career opportunities as more and more businesses invest more into their online storefronts and continue to grow their businesses and the demand for Magento expertise will also continue to grow. You can start your career off as an entry level Magento developer and then quickly move into a mid level position and within a couple years become a senior Magento developer after gaining some real world experience. And the growth doesn't have to stop there. As businesses grow, they look for developers to work on and manage larger and more complex projects. This presents opportunities for developers to work on enterprise level projects for big companies and organizations. This can lead to more job opportunities and higher earning potential. If you wanted to stay in development but wanted to progress a bit further down a career path, you can grow into another position such as a lead developer where you can still code but also be involved in the tech operations by running pure coding reviews, providing architecture advice to other developers, and assisting with the hiring process of other devs. If you want to go down other tracks, you can follow progress down the architecture layer and become a technical or solutions architect, which is what I did before I started my training company. Both of these positions either diagram or plan out large tech implementations before they get developed, which can help make sure they are architected in a way that is efficient and can optimally scale. These positions are also only usually available within much larger organizations which align with Magento's path of scaling to large and enterprise level businesses. If you are interested in the management aspect of things and see yourself becoming something like a CTO in the future, you can also go to another the path of a tech or team lead to be in charge of managing and scaling the operations of a team. This is more of a leadership position rather than a tech position, but can also help advance your career if you'd like to go down that path. Additionally, you can also stick with development and continue building out your expertise, which is my favorite recommended path. This can include building out systems integrations, inventory management systems, or custom payment gateways. Sometimes sticking with coding is the best option and you can continue to advance into additional levels of seniority over your years as a developer. Developers with expertise in Magento can also consider building out their own businesses just like I have. I've actually known quite a few ex Magento developers that want to start very successful companies and a lot of the reason is because of the grit and perseverance that they've learned during their time as a Magento developer and after you've worked with the framework so complex and involved with such as Magento, you have learned many advanced level design patterns and programming methodologies that will really set you up great for your next developer position outside of Magento. If things ever change for you. Let's fast forward to the future after you've picked up all of the Magento foundational skills and are facing that next big question. How can you land that great job that you've been eyeing down? I'm not really sure, but I know what it takes to fail a technical Magento interview, and I cover exactly how to do that in this next video.