We launched Platform Engineering University a year ago with a simple assumption: junior DevOps engineers would flock to learn platform engineering fundamentals. We were completely wrong.
Nearly 2,000 students later, the data tells a different story. Senior Platform Engineers and Heads of Platform became our primary audience - not to learn what platform engineering is, but to validate what they already knew and establish shared language across their teams. This insight reshaped our entire course ecosystem, transforming a single fundamentals certification into a four-tier learning architecture that now serves the full spectrum of platform engineering roles.
Here's what we learned building a complete learning ecosystem for one of the fastest-growing disciplines in software engineering.
The demographic surprise: Senior engineers seeking knowledge, not juniors seeking transition
The fundamentals course launched with content designed for career transitioners, DevOps or SRE titles who wanted to become platform engineers. We quickly realized something unexpected.
The typical student profile:
- Senior Platform Engineers with 8+ years of infrastructure experience
- Heads of Platform managing platform teams
- Technical leaders responsible for platform strategy and adoption
These weren't people learning platform engineering from scratch. They were experienced practitioners seeking confirmation they understood best practices correctly. They wanted to ensure they weren't mixing up developer portals and Internal Developer Platforms. They wanted to sense check from a group of their peers that they were on the right path. They wanted to discuss their failures and successes. They needed standardized terminology to align their teams.
The validation pattern became clear: a Head of Platform would complete the course first, confirm the content matched their understanding of best practices, then enroll their platform team - often around 20-30 engineers. This wasn't about training - it was about establishing shared language, and best practices at scale.
The State of Platform Engineering Volume 4 survey, which gathered responses from nearly 500 practitioners, confirmed why this mattered. Shared language, platform as a product adoption, and internal adoption struggles ranked as the biggest challenges teams face. Senior engineers weren't looking for basic training. They were looking for a common vocabulary that would solve communication breakdowns across their organizations.
From fundamentals to four-tier architecture: Building a complete learning path
The demographic insight forced a curriculum rethink. If senior engineers were the primary audience, the course ecosystem needed far more depth.
Over the past year, the single fundamentals course evolved into a comprehensive certification architecture:
Platform Engineering Certified Practitioner: This covers core concepts for anyone entering the field - abstraction layers, golden paths, platform as a product, and the Minimum Viable Platform to Internal Developer Platform progression. It's still perfect for DevOps professionals transitioning to platform engineering, but its real value is establishing foundational shared language for existing practitioners.
Platform Engineering Certified Professional: This goes deep on expert-level implementation. This certification targets senior engineers who need advanced patterns for complex platform challenges.
Platform Engineering Certified Leader: It addresses the non-technical side. Platform leaders need to secure buy-in from their engineers and their executives, build roadmaps, and manage platform teams. This certification focuses on leadership elements and organizational aspects.
Platform Engineering Certified Architect: This tackles architecture and implementation details. It's code-focused, covering platform architecture patterns and technical decision frameworks for building robust Internal Developer Platforms.
Specialized domains: Following the community's fastest-growing segments
The Platform Engineering community has grown to over 270,000. Within our community, four segments are expanding faster than others: Security Platform Engineering, Observability Platform Engineering, Data Platform Engineering, and AI.
The course ecosystem followed this growth pattern. Beyond the core certifications, specialized courses now address domain-specific platform challenges:
- Observability for Platform Engineers covers how platform teams instrument, monitor, and improve platform reliability
- Kubernetes Cluster Lifecycle Management in Platform Engineering provides deep technical knowledge for container orchestration at scale
- Cloud Development Environments for Platform Engineers explores remote development infrastructure and developer experience optimization
And more than that, in 2026, we will be adding new courses every month. With security courses covering vulnerability management, identity management and related topics. AI-focused courses are also planned, addressing how platform teams enable ML workflows and build AI-powered developer tools.
These specialized courses integrate with the core certification path, allowing platform engineers to build T-shaped expertise based on deep platform engineering fundamentals plus specialized domain knowledge.
Why teams adopt courses together
Here's the thing: technical training isn't the primary value proposition. Shared language and best practice is.
When a Head of Platform enrolls their entire platform team, they're not fixing skill gaps. They're solving a communication problem. Teams use different terminology for the same concepts. One engineer calls something a "service catalog" while another calls it a "developer portal." These inconsistencies create friction, slow adoption, and complicate platform strategy discussions.
One team thinks they simply need more Backstage plugins, one team understands the need for a strong platform backend.
The courses establish standardized terminology and best practice across core platform engineering concepts:
- Abstraction layers define how platforms hide infrastructure complexity while maintaining flexibility
- Golden paths provide opinionated, well-supported workflows that guide developers toward best practices
- Platform as a product frames internal platforms as products with users, adoption metrics, and continuous improvement cycles
- MVP to IDP progression outlines the journey from Minimum Viable Platform to full Internal Developer Platform
When an entire team completes the same course, they emerge with a common vocabulary, and shared understanding of how to move forward. Strategy discussions become more efficient. Documentation becomes more consistent. New team members onboard faster because the strategy is standardized and clear.
At the same time, this creates several organizational benefits:
- Faster onboarding for new platform team members who can reference standardized concepts and terminology from day one
- Improved collaboration across teams that previously used inconsistent language for platform concepts
- Clearer roadmaps because leadership and engineering teams share the same mental models for platform maturity and evolution
When an entire team completes a course together, they develop shared context that improves every subsequent platform decision and discussion.
This team-scale adoption pattern reflects broader platform engineering trends. The discipline is maturing from ad-hoc infrastructure automation to structured, product-oriented platform teams. Those teams need standardized knowledge and shared practices to function effectively. The course ecosystem provides that foundation.
That’s why looking ahead, the course ecosystem will continue to expand based on the needs of both the community, and the industry. Stay tuned.
