the vespa cunundrum

A question has been bugging me for a while. What to do with vespa dominix?
I created her while a pirate as a means to ship crap to lowsec and join in on mining ops run by the logistics corp. but as she is on the same account as astral I never wanted to invest a huge amount of time on her as it detracted from all the new shiney’s I had astral training for.
As a result I never properly developed her, she has “some” learning skills, but no advanced and none to V, she has minmatar industrial ships to 4 to haul crap and a “few” supporting skills. She can fly mining barges but is lacking the exhumer skills.. she has just about got the skills to fly a rough t1 fit caracal on missions…you get the idea. She gets by but lacks any real skill and can do most things but nothing well. This is in sharp contrast to astral who is a specific armour tanked killing machine, and he does it VERY well.

Anyway last night vespa was moving some mods and implants up to astral, who I have recently decided to use mainly for fun (in that I now refuse to grind sec status with him, I do what im in the mood for, roam, do exploration..shoot passer by’s) , his sec status is still going up tho slowly and I am finding he makes a fair bit of money in the process without really meaning to, which stacks up as I’m not replacing PVP ships every few days. Anyway I was doing a long run back from jita and I decided it might be time to round out vespa’s skills and make her more useful. Besides astral doesn’t NEED to train any skills for anything new, he is stable and does what he wants well so I don’t mind losing training time at the moment.
So I dropped of astrals bits and picked up vespa's shit fit caracal and had a look what skills I needed, I set a que of learning skills and core skills going and opened up the fitting window on my carcal, 5 standard launchers 1 medium clarity shield thing …that’s it.
I looked through my hanger for shield mods…nothing. Its all armour and lasers for astral. So I opened the market..after browsing for a few mins I realised, I have NO IDEA how to shield tank.
As stupid as it seems I have never needed it, as a shield was just a buffer to my armour tank, I never worried about it before. So I called in relso out CEO for some fitting advice, and between what he suggested and my skills on vespa we came up with a fit that “gets by”. Now I was going to start running lvl 1 and 2 missions for fed navy and grind up to lvl 4’s as I build vespa up to a drake over the next few weeks to make her a source of income, then get her into a blockade runner for shiping to and trading in lowsec. But a few of my corp mates invited me to join them on a lvl 4, and I figured the standings boost would be good for vespa and it would be a nice test for the caracal and more “social”.
I learned a few things.
I am very out of practice with missions.
The difference between running missions with a character with over 10 million SP compared to 2,7 mill is HUGE.
I do NOT like shield tanks

My caracal had to warp out twice when she drew aggro I was doing hardly any damage with my missiles basically I missed flying astral in a mobile death machine. Still I will continue developing her when I can and see if she becomes the income source I want.