What is Adobe Experience Manager?
AEM stands for Adobe Experience Manager. It is a content management system (CMS) that is similar to WordPress. AEM is a system that is used worldwide amongst some of the largest companies making AEM Developers very much in demand. Organizations today prefer AEM to showcase their product and services in a user-friendly manner. This has largely resulted in a demand for AEM experts, making it a suitable career option for software developers.
Adobe Experience Manager is a new age comprehensive content management solution for building mobile applications, websites and forms. With the help of Adobe Experience Manager, managing marketing content and assets is much easier. An AEM developer possesses the skills to streamline company processes and assists the clients in achieving strategic objectives through the setup and configuration of AEM development environments. Hence the demand of AEM developers is on the rise in today’s time. But don’t be in a hurry, here are some basic requirements that AEM developers need to fulfill before you announce them to be the right fit for your project.
Here are the list of things you should look for when hiring an AEM Developer for your project:
1) Adobe Certification
You need to note that not all Adobe developers have certification. Hence, you need to ensure that the talent you are looking to hire has an Adobe certification. Getting the certification is simple and it just ensures that the candidate is well versed with the basics of AEM. Adobe certification is also a representation of completed courses and training relevant to what they will be doing for your company.
2) Experience
In the end, experience counts! It is always an add-on benefit to hire a developer that carries experience. Apart from the certification, you should always look out for a talent that has an experience not only with the Adobe Experience cloud but even with CR, Apache Sling, Apache Felix, OSGi, REST, JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, JSON, HTML and CSS. Before taking a talent on board, you should ask them about their experience with Adobe and how they intend to use the platform to meet your requirements.
3) Strong technical know-how
Technical know-how is indeed the 1st parameter that signals how good the candidate is to meet your requirements. Here are a list of platforms that an AEM Developer needs to have expertise in to make them a good and strong candidate:
CSS, Javascript, HTML – Having CSS/Javascript experience is key. Also, having the ability to apply a quick style to the component instead of waiting for the Web Developer to do it only saves time for everyone.
AJAX/JQuery/EXTJS – Adobe AEM pre-compiles published pages into static HTML, so dynamic content is pulled-in via AJAX – usually with a library like JQuery. Additionally, EXTJS is used to create custom widgets for your editor dialogs. Experience with these is in my top 3 must-haves.
OSGi/FELIX – Scheduled jobs and services run as ‘bundles’ in the built-in Felix console. While OSGi-specific experience is not a requirement, experience developing some type of service is required
Web Services creation and consumption – Any dynamic content ingested from an external service is usually accomplished by interacting with a service-layer running on an application server like Tomcat or JBOSS. A web services developer will be a key player on the team to assist with this interaction. You need at least one on the team with this skill.
CMS development experience – This isn’t a must-have, but understanding the concepts surrounding using a CMS versus traditional MVC (Model, View, Controller) development is helpful. It helps with the learning curve of using a CMS.
Java Content Repository (JCR)/CRX – Getting away from the relational database mindset, where everything is tied together with some sort of key is a hard concept to grasp. Not a must-have, but having someone on the team understand the underlying data repository is a nice-to-have.
Other nice-to-haves – Eclipse IDE, Maven, SVN, Jenkins, Artifactory, Apache Sling, Lucene, Tomcat/JBoss, Apache web server, analytics tagging
4) Soft Skills
It is true that technical know-how is the first qualifier for a good AEM Developer. However, in today’s world where communication is equally important, we cannot ignore the importance of soft skills in a talent, especially for senior developers or leads. Senior developers or project team leads are expected to interact and communicate with many stakeholders ranging from clients to internal team members. Hence, having strong soft skills can ensure smooth execution of your project.
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