Claude skills for you, your team and the company

A skill is a folder with instructions and examples that Claude pulls in when the task fits. In Skills in Claude Cowork we made the first one. After training, the question we hear most often is whose skill it is.

Why skills are worth it

Every company has jobs that come back, such as the monthly report, client onboarding or the board report. Most of them live in the head of the person who does them best. When that person is busy or leaves, someone else does the job their own way.

A skill writes the job down once, with the steps, the rules and two good examples. From then on Claude does the job the same way for everyone who uses it.

Who a skill belongs to decides how it reaches the people who need it.

Your own skills

Every skill starts here, and most should stay here. You have a job you do again and again, such as the monthly report you write. You write down how you do it, put two good examples in the folder and ask Claude to use the skill next time.

In the Claude apps you upload the folder under Customize > Skills, or ask Claude to write the skill with you.

I keep a skill for drafting these guides, with a rule against three-word sentences. At this level a skill only has to work for you, and it can be messy.

Let skill-creator write and test it

skill-creator is a skill from Anthropic that helps you write a skill and test it. In the Claude apps it is already listed under Customize > Skills as from Anthropic. Turn it on if it is off. In Claude Code you install it as a plugin.

To use it, just ask, for example "Use skill-creator to make a skill for our board report". It asks you about the job, when the skill should be used and what a good result looks like. Then it drafts the skill and suggests a few evals.

An eval is a test for the skill. It is a realistic request, such as "Q3 board report from these notes", and the checks a good answer must pass. Claude runs the request and marks each check pass or fail.

Evals work best for what can be measured, such as a table, a length or the right numbers. For tone and style, Anthropic advises judging the answers yourself.

In chat, skill-creator runs the evals one at a time and shows you the results. In Cowork and Claude Code it also runs them without the skill, so you can compare pass rate, time and tokens.

The team's skills

A skill becomes the team's the day a colleague uses it and tells you what you left out.

On Team and Enterprise you can share a skill with named colleagues, and on Enterprise with a group. Colleagues can use the skill but not edit it, and they get your new version the next time they use it. If you cannot share a skill, an Owner has to turn sharing on.

A team skill needs one owner, who decides when a change goes in, and a change log at the bottom of the file, one line per change with the reason.

If you work with agents in folders, we recommend keeping the team's skills in the folder, not in each person's own settings, so everyone who works in the folder has the same skills. An agent in a folder explains the idea, and How to set up a shared agent folder for your team shows how a team shares one.

Skills get better with feedback

When a result is off, tell Claude what was wrong and ask it to update the skill. Claude puts the correction into the skill, so the next run starts from it.

Once many people use and correct the same skill, the company needs a system to get each new version to all of them. A skill published to the organisation changes only when someone publishes it again. Anthropic's enterprise guide also recommends running the evals again when models or workflows change.

The company's skills

Only the skills that should make the whole company sound and behave the same belong here, such as tone of voice, how client data is handled and the board report template.

An Owner can provision a skill to everyone under Organization settings > Plugins & skills. It is on for everyone, and each person can switch it off.

The other route is the company library. An employee submits a skill with Publish to org. On the Policy tab, an Owner sets Publishing to Off, Open or Requires review. On the Team plan, Publishing starts on Open.

On Enterprise a security scan checks every skill that is uploaded or edited, and blocks one that fails. It has been on by default since 2 October 2026 where no Owner has set it, but skills that were there before it came on are not scanned. A skill can run code, so read it before you switch it on.

Plugins and the company marketplace

A plugin bundles several skills with connectors. Anthropic publishes plugins for finance, legal, sales and data, and a company can build its own. The company marketplace, under the same settings page, is filled with ZIP uploads or synced from a private GitHub repository.

On Enterprise each group can have its own plugin settings, and someone in several groups gets the most permissive one. That is also how a skill reaches only part of the company. The Owner bundles it in a plugin and assigns the plugin to a group.

Skills in GitHub, with versions

For most teams, sharing inside Claude is enough. Anthropic's enterprise guide recommends keeping skills in Git, with review and a way back to an earlier version. That matters most when many people use a skill or it runs scripts.

Build your own skills marketplace

Many of the companies we work with use more than one AI tool. Each tool gets its own copy of the same skill, and the copies drift apart. A company catalogue keeps one approved version of each skill.

Skills follow an open standard, and Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and Cursor read the same skill folder. Microsoft 365 Copilot has it in preview.

• One private repository, with an owner, review and a version for each skill.
• An internal page behind the company sign-in, for example Microsoft Entra ID, where groups decide who sees which skill.
• The tools. Employees install a skill from the page into their own tool.

Try it with your team

Ask everyone to write down the three jobs they repeat most. Pick the one that comes back every week, write down how the best person in the room does it, and give it to Claude with two examples.

YouCopy

Make a skill for our weekly portfolio report. Here are two reports we were happy with and the notes they were built from. Write what the skill does, when to use it and which sections the report always has. Ask me about anything unclear before you make it.

Use it once, correct it once, and share it with the team. What else belongs in the folder around it is the subject of An agent in a folder.