Lab 1 — Build your role-target map and first 30-day plan

Objective

By the end of this lab you will have a one-page written artifact — your role-target map — that names a primary and backup target role, scores your current skills against that role's rubric, ranks your three decisive gaps, and lays out a concrete 30-day learning plan pointed at specific Virnexa courses. This is the first draft of the career thesis the rest of the School of Career Excellence builds on. There is nothing to run and no code to write; the whole lab is structured writing.

Skills exercised:

• Committing to a defensible primary and backup role target
• Scoring yourself against a role rubric with honest, comparable levels
• Ranking gaps by weight and distance so effort lands where it counts
• Mapping gaps to specific Virnexa schools and courses on a weekly plan

Prerequisites and setup

Prerequisites: the three lessons in this course — The data and AI role landscape, Matching yourself to a target role, and How the market and hiring actually work. Have the written notes you produced in each lesson's hands-on activity nearby; this lab consolidates them.

Setup: you need one writing surface — a document, a spreadsheet, or a notebook page — and nothing else. No account, no install, no tooling. Create a single file named role-target-map (any format you like) and give it five headings matching the steps below: Target, Skill scores, Ranked gaps, 30-day plan, and One-page map. You will fill one section per step.

note

This is a resumable, written lab. If you close your document and come back, re-open role-target-map and continue at the first heading that is still empty. Nothing is lost between sessions, and no step depends on a running process.

Step 1 — Commit to a primary and backup target

Turn your Lesson 2 instinct into a written commitment.

Under the Target heading, write three things:

1. Your primary target role, chosen from the five anchors in Lesson 1 (data analyst, analytics engineer, data engineer, ML/AI engineer, or MLOps engineer).
2. A backup target that shares most of the primary's core skills, so one plan can serve both.
3. One sentence justifying the pairing — why this primary, and why this backup is a natural fallback given your current strengths.

Checkpoint: your Target section now names a primary role, a backup role, and a one-sentence rationale. If your backup shares few skills with your primary, reconsider it — a backup that needs a separate plan defeats the purpose (revisit the Lesson 2 recap on shared-plan backups).

Step 2 — Score yourself against the role rubric

Build the skill table for your primary target using the rubric below as a starting point. Pick the row group that matches your primary role, adjust it to any specifics in a real posting you have read, and aim for six to eight skills.

If your primary is…	Core skills to score (needed level in parentheses)
Data analyst	SQL (3), a BI tool (3), spreadsheet modeling (2), metric definition (2), stakeholder communication (3), basic statistics (2)
Analytics engineer	SQL (3), data modeling (3), a transformation framework like dbt (3), testing and documentation (2), Git (2), warehouse concepts (2)
Data engineer	SQL (3), Python for data (3), pipelines and orchestration (3), distributed processing (2), cloud storage and warehousing (2), Git and reproducibility (2)
ML/AI engineer	Python (3), ML or LLM libraries (3), data preparation (2), model or prompt evaluation (3), serving behind an API (2), experiment tracking (2)
MLOps engineer	Python (2), containers and CI/CD (3), model deployment (3), monitoring and drift detection (3), infrastructure-as-code (2), cost awareness (2)

Under Skill scores, make a four-column table: skill, needed level, your current level (rate honestly on the 0–3 scale from Lesson 2), and distance (needed minus current). Add a fifth column marking each skill's weight as high or medium for the role.

Checkpoint: your Skill scores section holds a table with six to eight rows, each with a needed level, an honest current level, a computed distance, and a weight. If every current level is a 2 or 3, apply the honesty rule again — a skill you can only do by copying a tutorial is a 1.

Step 3 — Rank your three decisive gaps

Turn the table into a priority list.

From your Skill scores table, select the three gaps that score highest on weight and distance together — a high-weight, high-distance gap outranks a low-weight one every time. Under Ranked gaps, write them in priority order, 1 to 3, each with its skill name, its distance, and one line on why it is decisive for this role. Below the three, add one line naming a gap you are deliberately choosing to ignore for now and why it can wait.

Checkpoint: your Ranked gaps section now has a numbered list of exactly three decisive gaps in priority order, plus one explicitly deprioritized gap. If your top-ranked gap is a medium-weight skill, re-check — a high-weight gap at the same distance should rank above it.

Step 4 — Draft a 30-day plan mapped to Virnexa courses

Turn your top gaps into four weeks of concrete study, each week pointed at a specific Virnexa school or course rather than a vague intention.

Use this map from common gaps to Virnexa starting points; pick the ones that match your ranked gaps:

Gap area	Virnexa starting point
SQL foundations (analyst)	DA-101 SQL Fundamentals for Analysts
SQL for engineering	DE-102 SQL for Data Engineers
Data engineering mental models	DE-101 Data Engineering Foundations
Python for data	DE-103 Python for Data Engineering
LLM and AI engineering foundations	GA-101 LLM Foundations
Analytics, MLOps, cloud, agents	The matching School of ... track (Data Analytics, MLOps & LLMOps, Cloud Data Platforms, Agentic AI)

Under 30-day plan, write four week blocks. For each week, state the gap it targets, the specific Virnexa course or school you will work through, and one observable weekly outcome — something you will have produced or be able to do by the end of that week (for example, "complete DE-101 lessons 1–3 and the pipeline lab"). Front-load your highest-ranked gap into weeks 1 and 2.

Checkpoint: your 30-day plan section has four week blocks, each naming a targeted gap, a specific Virnexa course or school, and one observable weekly outcome. If any week says only "study more" or names no course, tighten it until it points at a specific course and a checkable outcome.

Step 5 — Assemble the one-page map

Bring the pieces into a single, skimmable page.

Under One-page map, write a clean summary a mentor could read in two minutes:

• Target: primary and backup role, one line each.
• Top 3 gaps: the ranked list from Step 3, one line each.
• 30-day plan: the four weekly outcomes from Step 4, one line each.
• My signal: one sentence naming the inspectable proof of work you will lead with, drawn from your Lesson 3 activity.

Keep the whole summary to one page. If it runs longer, you are including detail that belongs in the earlier sections, not the map.

Checkpoint: your One-page map section fits on a single page and contains all four blocks — target, top 3 gaps, 30-day plan, and signal. If a mentor skimming it could not tell what you are aiming for and what you will do in the next month, revise until they could.

Validation

Verify the whole artifact against the objective: a coherent, one-page role-target map with a mapped 30-day plan. Read your finished document top to bottom and confirm each item below is true. This is your self-validation checklist — every box must hold.

• Your primary and backup targets are named and share a plan.
• Your skill table has six to eight rows with honest current levels and computed distances.
• Exactly three decisive gaps are ranked, each high-weight and high-distance.
• The 30-day plan has four weeks, each mapped to a specific Virnexa course or school with an observable weekly outcome.
• The one-page map is skimmable in two minutes and includes your signal.
• Nothing in the plan contradicts the ranked gaps — week 1 targets your top-ranked gap.

Checkpoint: every item above is true of your document. If any is false, the map is not yet complete — return to the step that produced it and fix it. When all six hold, your role-target map is done and ready to carry into CE-102 and CE-201.

Teardown

Nothing to tear down — this lab produced a written document with no billable resources or running processes. Keep your role-target-map file; you will revise it throughout the School of Career Excellence.

Troubleshooting and FAQ

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
Every skill scores a 2 or 3	Rating aspirationally, not honestly	Apply the Lesson 2 rule — tutorial-dependent or once-learned skills are a 1
Cannot pick just three gaps	Gaps ranked by size alone, not weight	Re-sort by weight first, then distance; keep only the top three high-weight gaps
Backup role needs a totally different plan	Backup shares few skills with the primary	Choose a backup adjacent to the primary (Lesson 1 table) so one plan serves both
A plan week says only "study Python" with no course	Gap not mapped to a concrete resource	Point each week at a specific Virnexa course from the Step 4 map
The one-page map runs to three pages	Detail from earlier sections copied in	The map is a summary; move specifics back to their own sections and keep one line each
Unsure which school a gap maps to	Gap area not in the Step 4 table	Match the gap to the closest School of ... track named in the table's last row