Skill Matrix

Update strength/gap ratings roughly every 2 weeks. Importance ratings rarely change.

Legend: Strength — None / Weak / Moderate / Strong. Importance — Mandatory / Important / Optional.

Core FDE Skills

Skill Area	Importance	Strength	Gap	Recommendation
Customer Discovery	Mandatory
Technical Consulting	Mandatory
Solution Design	Mandatory
System Design	Mandatory
Enterprise Integration	Important
API Strategy	Important
Technical Communication	Mandatory
Stakeholder Management	Important
Architecture Reviews	Important

Software Engineering

Skill Area	Importance	Strength	Gap	Recommendation
Java	Mandatory	Strong	Low	Maintain
Python	Mandatory
API Development	Mandatory
Testing	Important
Reliability	Important
Observability	Important

GCP

Skill Area	Importance	Strength	Gap	Recommendation
Core GCP Services	Mandatory
IAM	Mandatory
Networking	Important
Cloud Run	Mandatory
GKE	Optional (for now)			Defer past Phase 1
Pub/Sub	Important
BigQuery	Important
Dataflow	Optional
Vertex AI	Mandatory			Top priority

AI Engineering

Skill Area	Importance	Strength	Gap	Recommendation
Prompt Engineering	Mandatory
LLM Fundamentals	Mandatory
RAG	Mandatory
Embeddings	Mandatory
Vector Databases	Mandatory
AI Evaluation	Important
AI Safety	Important
LLM Observability	Optional (for now)			Phase 4

Agentic Systems

Skill Area	Importance	Strength	Gap	Recommendation
ADK	Mandatory			Priority framework
LangGraph	Important			Secondary/comparative only
CrewAI	Optional			Skip unless time allows
ReAct	Mandatory
Planning Architectures	Important
Hierarchical Agents	Optional			Phase 3+
Multi-Agent Systems	Important
State Management	Important

Production AI Systems

Skill Area	Importance	Strength	Gap	Recommendation
Monitoring	Important			Phase 4
Evaluation Pipelines	Important			Phase 4
Latency Optimization	Optional
Cost Optimization	Important
Tracing	Optional
Security	Important
Scalability	Important