How would you go about helping your team build the skills needed for a platform engineer? Are there any key skills in particular that you would prioritize?

Key skills that platform engineers need beyond the technical aspects:
- Understanding of cognitive load
- Product mindset
- Empathy
- Building platform that people want to use voluntarily

I'd ensure we had several things clearly defined, such as our definition of "platform engineer", what they are responsible for, and the expectations for the role.

I think platform engineer is becoming the new name for what "DevOps engineer" was for the past couple of years. In my opinion, this diverged from the original concept of "DevOps" (DevOps is a process, not a team), but times change, and language does too.

With role expectations clearly defined, the list of skills will emerge.  It's still good to capture them.

Having someone take the lead on getting all of the definitions done could be an excellent opportunity for you to delegate and give someone a chance to build their leadership skills.

I think documentation and clarity in that documentation is a crucial skill for platform engineers as they often build support systems and tooling for others.  Being able to provide documentation on what/why something exists and how to use it will also allow a platform engineering team to grow.

More technical skills would fall under:
* Observability/Monitoring/Alerting
* Infrastructure (building, maintaining, enhancing) - greatly depends on your environment
* Establishing internal SLAs/SLOs