7. Working with Skills

Course: Claude 101 Estimated time: 13 minutes

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

Explain what skills are and how they work
Browse and install skills from the marketplace
Create your own custom skill

What are Skills?

Skills are pre-built instruction packages that teach Claude how to do a specific task in a consistent, repeatable way. Think of a skill as a saved workflow — you install it once, and then you can trigger it with a simple command whenever you need it.

Skills are built on top of Claude's natural language capabilities and Anthropic's Claude Code platform — they're a way to package up knowledge, instructions, and context so Claude can follow a consistent process for a repeated task.

Types of Skills

Marketplace skills: Pre-built skills from Anthropic and third parties, available in the Skills Marketplace. Examples include:

/commit — auto-generates commit messages from your staged changes
/review — reviews your code and flags issues
/summarize — summarizes a document in your preferred format

Custom skills: You can create your own skills to capture your unique workflows. Examples:

"When I run /weekly-report, summarize my last 7 days of notes in the format: 3 wins, 3 blockers, 1 priority"
"When I run /email-draft, write a professional email in my voice based on the bullet points I provide"
"When I run /feedback-review, analyze the customer feedback I paste and return a prioritized list of issues"

Creating Skills

Skills are defined in Markdown files:

Navigate to Settings → Skills
Click "New skill" (or go to .claude/skills/ in your project)
Give it a name — this becomes the /command
Write the instructions: describe the trigger, the task, the format
Save and invoke it with /skill-name

The Marketplace

Claude skills are available in the Skills Marketplace. The marketplace lets you:

Browse pre-built skills across categories (coding, writing, analysis, etc.)
Install a skill with one click and start using it immediately
Share skills you've built with your team or organization

Browse at claude.ai/skills or via Settings → Skills Marketplace.

Skills on Projects

Skills work particularly well inside Projects:

You can add specific skills to a Project so they're always available for that context
Project-level skills stay activated for all conversations within that Project

Lesson reflection

Before moving on, consider:

What recurring tasks could you turn into a skill?
Which marketplace skills do you think would add the most value to your workflow?
How would you describe a skill you'd want to build in one sentence (the trigger + the output)?

Working with skills