Claude Skills explained: what they are and how a business uses them.
A skill is how you teach Claude to do a job your way, once, so nobody has to explain it again. Here is what that looks like for quotes, reports and SOPs, and how it differs from a Project.
Kristian Njegovanovic, Director, Scalify · Updated 29 October 2026
What are Claude Skills?
Claude Skills are saved sets of instructions, examples and files that teach Claude how to do one specific job the way your business does it. Claude reads the short description of each skill you have switched on and loads the full skill only when a request needs it, like writing a quote in your format.
Think of a skill as the instructions you would give a good new starter for one task, plus the examples you would show them. "This is how we lay out a commercial quote. These are our standard exclusions. This is the tone. Here are three we sent last month." Instead of pasting that into every chat, you save it once and Claude picks it up when the job comes along.
Under the hood a skill is a folder with one main file, called SKILL.md, that holds a name, a one-line description and the instructions. The folder can also carry templates, logos, reference documents and small scripts. You do not need to touch any of that to use one, but it helps to know there is nothing magic inside: it is your process, written down. Anthropic's help page on using skills covers the settings.
What can a business use Claude Skills for?
Anything you do repeatedly that has a right way of doing it. In small businesses that usually means quotes and proposals in a set format, reports in a house style, letters and engagement documents, and step-by-step procedures. If you find yourself correcting Claude on the same thing every week, that correction belongs in a skill.
These are the skills we see built most often with owners and their teams. None of them replace the person who checks the output. They remove the hour of formatting, rewording and hunting for last month's version.
| Skill | What the skill holds | What a person still does |
|---|---|---|
| Quote or proposal writer | Your layout, standard inclusions and exclusions, payment terms, and a handful of real past quotes | Checks the price and the scope before it goes out |
| Report in house style | Your report template, headings, the way you phrase findings, and two or three good past reports | Adds the site observations and signs it off |
| Letter of engagement or contract draft | Your standard clauses, which sections change per client, and a few real past letters | Reviews the changed sections, which is where the risk sits |
| SOP and procedure writer | Your SOP format and plain-language rules, so a voice note or rough notes become a clean procedure | Confirms the steps match how the job is really done |
| Brand and tone | Logo, colours, fonts, words you use and words you never use | Approves anything client-facing |
What is the difference between Claude Skills and Projects?
A Project holds context for one body of work: its documents, chat history and instructions, used only inside that Project. A skill holds a method for one task and works in any chat where it is switched on. Use a Project for "everything about this client"; use a skill for "how we write a quote".
The two work well together. A Project for a big job can hold the drawings, the contract and the correspondence, and your quote skill can still kick in inside it. Where people go wrong is pasting the same formatting rules into ten different Projects, then updating only three of them when the rules change. Rules that apply everywhere belong in a skill. We go deeper on Projects, and on building a company knowledge base with them, in our post on Claude Projects as an AI brain.
| Skills | Projects | |
|---|---|---|
| What it holds | How to do one task: steps, format, examples, templates | What one piece of work is about: documents, history, instructions |
| Where it works | Any chat where the skill is switched on, plus Claude Code and Cowork | Only inside that Project |
| When Claude uses it | Automatically, when a request matches its description | Always, for every chat in the Project |
| Best for | Repeatable outputs: quotes, reports, letters, SOPs | Ongoing work: a client, a job, a department |
| Sharing on Team plans | Shared view-only, or provisioned to everyone by the owner | Shared with "can view" or "can edit" access |
How do you create a Claude Skill?
The easiest way is to ask Claude to help you write one, using your real examples, then save it under Customize, Skills. On Pro, Max and Team plans, you can also record yourself doing a task in Cowork on a Mac, and Claude proposes a skill from it. Technical users can write the SKILL.md file by hand.
Whichever way you go, the steps that matter are the same:
- Pick one job. One skill per workflow. Anthropic's own guidance is that several focused skills work better than one big one.
- Gather your best real examples. Three to five past quotes, reports or letters you were happy with. Strip out client details you would not want sitting in a file.
- Write the description carefully. It is the line Claude reads to decide when to use the skill, so say exactly when it applies: "Use when drafting a commercial plumbing quote."
- Test it on a live job. Ask for the thing in plain words and see whether Claude picks the skill up. If it does not, the description is usually the fix.
- Fix it every time you correct the output. Each correction you make by hand is a line missing from the skill.
The Cowork route is worth knowing about because it suits owners who would rather show than write. If you have not used Cowork yet, our guide to Claude Cowork for business explains what it does and where it falls short.
Want your team leaving with working skills built on your own quotes, reports and procedures? Our Claude training sets up the account with you and builds them on real work, not demo files.
See Claude trainingHow does a team share Claude Skills?
On Claude Team and Enterprise plans, staff can share a skill with specific colleagues once the organisation owner turns sharing on, and the owner can provision a skill so it appears for everyone automatically. Shared skills are view-only, and people get updates when the creator changes the skill. On Free, Pro and Max, skills stay in each person's account.
This is the strongest reason we give owners for moving a team onto a Team plan. One person writes the quote skill properly, the owner provisions it, and every quote comes out the same way, whoever writes it. Change the payment terms once and the whole team has the new version that afternoon.
Two practical points. First, sharing is off by default, so the owner has to switch it on in the organisation settings. Second, decide who owns each skill. A skill that three people edit in their own copies drifts the same way a shared Word template does. If your team runs several skills together as a system, with jobs handed from one to the next, that is the kind of setup we build in our AI teams work.
What makes a skill work well, or fail?
Skills work when they are narrow, built on your own past work, and checked by a person before anything leaves the business. They fail when they are vague, try to cover every job at once, or are trusted with numbers they were never given, like your rates or margins.
- Your voice, not Claude's. An ISO auditor we work with found generic AI reports came out too wordy for their clients. So the skill for the auditor's reports starts from their own past reports, not a generic template, so the drafts sound like the auditor.
- Your numbers, not a guess. A format skill makes a quote look right. It does not make the price right unless the skill or the chat has your price list and past jobs.
- Draft, then check. The setup that works in practice is one creates, one checks: Claude drafts in your format, a person reviews before it is sent.
Are Claude Skills safe to use?
Skills you write yourself from your own documents are as safe as the Claude plan you run them on. The risk is in skills downloaded from strangers, because a skill can include scripts that run when it loads. Anthropic's own advice is to install skills only from trusted sources and review what they contain first.
Keep passwords and API keys out of skills, and keep client personal information out of the example files: use past documents with the names stripped. If a skill drafts documents from sensitive files, our document processing work covers how we keep that data where it is allowed to be. Anthropic's guide to creating custom skills has the full security notes.
If you correct Claude on the same thing twice, write it into a skill so you never have to say it a third time.
Common questions
Are Claude Skills available on the free plan?
Yes. Anthropic lists skills on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, as long as code execution is switched on in settings. Sharing skills with colleagues needs a Team or Enterprise plan.
Do Claude Skills work in Claude Code?
Yes. Skills switched on in your Claude account also load in Claude Code when you sign in with the same account. The sync runs one way, from your account to Claude Code.
Are there ready-made skills I can switch on?
Anthropic includes skills for creating Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint decks and PDFs, and partners such as Notion, Canva, Figma and Atlassian publish their own. They are useful, but the skills that save the most time are the ones built on your own documents.
Can skills be used outside Claude?
Anthropic has published Agent Skills as an open standard so a skill can work across tools that support it. In practice, check that the other tool supports the standard before you rely on it.
Is a skill the same as an AI agent?
No. A skill teaches Claude how to do one task well when asked. An agent runs a series of tasks on its own, often on a schedule, and usually uses several skills along the way.
Checked 29 October 2026. Anthropic changes Claude's features and plan settings often, so check the current help pages before you roll anything out to a team.
Keep reading
A skill is your process, written down once. We will help you write the ones that matter.
Bring us the quotes, reports and procedures your team rewrites every week. We will turn them into skills and show your team how to run them, or join our two-day AI Sesh workshops in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne and build them yourself.