What this is
Which Way?
Skills.com is a place for people that are trying to figure things out (secret: we're all a little lost). Maybe you're trying to figure out your career, what your next job will be, how to retire, how to start. It is a place to find what you are looking for and to give what you have. The world is changing at a faster and faster pace. This is a place to slow down, to connect, to grow.
It is a community. Community is the only organizational structure capable of keeping pace with accelerating change; with people who have and who are going through the same thing as you are. This is about more than a specific skill, a trade or profession. It is about trying to use our natural instincts to learn, to grow.
Not a course platform. Not a social network for clicks and views. No ten steps, no hustle, no screaming headlines. Just people who've done a thing or two, sitting with people who want to.
Why Stories
Someone sat down and listened.
We've all been told at one point or another, before you can learn specific skills, you need to decide where you are going. What are you going to be? We think this is too restrictive, too confining. What if you want to be a lot of things? What if you are a lot of things? From the time we are babies, we learn from others - from watching and listening. We learn from other's experiences. So, we start there, by cataloging other's experiences - their stories.
But we learned much more than what a catalog could tell us. We've laughed, we've cried. Mostly, we've learned not how to do something, but what it takes to do it. It isn't the story that's the thing, the story just gives us a reason to listen and a reason to talk. A reason to develop a relationship we otherwise wouldn't have had.
We hope that as you read some of them, you get the same feeling we did. We hope that you will want yours told. With the pace of the world increasing each day, one of the biggest things we've learned is that developing relationships with others will be the only direction forward.
How it holds together
The line between two people is something one of them knows.
This isn't a network of job titles. You aren't a job, you're a person. Joe knows how to run conduit professionally and how to explain a thing to a sixteen-year-old. His passion is baking - he's trying to learn cornbread. He read Sharon's story "The Cornbread Queen", she's 22 and trying to fit out her first real bakery on a shoestring. They meet in the forums about her story. They both get what they want - Joe learns cornbread, Sharon learns conduit on a budget. Who's the teacher? Who's the student? Who cares?
Which is why the useful connection is almost never the obvious one. The person who changes your year or your life is usually two rooms over, talking about something else entirely.
Everyone here is a teacher, everyone a student.
WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DO HERE
Stories
WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND
One feeds the next
Everyone has a story, and every person's story is a living history of relationships- people connecting through their experiences, and everything that went into them. Every time a story is told, read, or talked about, the potential for a new relationship forms. Each of these stories is meant to lead to conversation that creates relationships and leads to more stories- a growing network of people learning from each other.
Nobody arrives able to do all three. Most people start by reading, because it costs nothing and asks nothing of you.
What it's for
Reading my story made me realize I'm really proud of myself.
Employers and sponsors
We do not work without you.
A community that makes people feel better and leaves them no better off has done half a job. The other half is tangible, real world opportunity — real projects, real contracts, real hires — and that comes from the people who pay for people with skills to apply them.
So sponsors are not advertisers here. A sponsor is a member like any other who wants to support people building skills. What they get back is the opportunity to be known by the people they will want to hire, before they need to hire them, or, to get their products and services in front of the people who will use them.
We are small, early, and haven't figured all of this out. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise. If you would like to know about getting in early and help us define what works for sponsors and employers, send us a note — it goes to a person, not a queue.
BETA - HERE BE DRAGONS
We have not figured it all out yet.
Skills.com is in beta. That is a polite way of saying unfinished. Some of it will break while you are using it, and a few things we are confident about today will turn out to be wrong. There is much we want to add, but we will need to get what we do have stable first.
So you will find rough edges. A page that does not do what you expect. A feature that is half an idea. We would rather you heard that from us than found it on your own and assumed it was you.
It is not you. Tell us what broke and we will fix it.
We are invitation only.
There's no sign-up button and no waiting list. Skills.com grows by invitation — somebody already here brings you in, which is why nobody is a stranger here.