Defining a Kubernetes training plan for monolith-to-microservices migration

[Aurora22]

My team is finally migrating our legacy monolithic application to a microservices architecture, and we've decided to use Kubernetes for orchestration, but the learning curve for our mostly junior-to-mid-level DevOps engineers is proving steeper than anticipated. We have the basic pods and deployments running in a development cluster, but I'm concerned about our lack of robust strategies for monitoring, persistent storage, and secure secret management in production. For engineering leads who have successfully navigated this transition, what were the most critical Kubernetes concepts and tools you prioritized for your team to master first? How did you structure your training and choose between the overwhelming number of available CNCF projects to build a stable, maintainable platform without getting bogged down in endless configuration and complexity?