Teach Claude your way of working using skills

Think about the last time you created something with Claude that turned out really well. Maybe it was a presentation, an analysis, or a report.

What made it work? Claude brought intelligence and capability, but you also played a crucial part—you explained your standards, you described the structure that works for your needs, you provided examples showing what you wanted, and you caught and fixed things that weren't quite right.

Instead of having to repeat this process the next time you complete a similar task, Skills let you package what you've learned. Then, whenever the context matches, Claude applies the expertise automatically. You're not explaining the same standards repeatedly. You're not hunting for that document with your guidelines. You're not fixing generic output to match what you know works. Claude recognizes the situation, loads your approach, and applies it.

You have tasks where you've figured out what works—a way of structuring reports, a framework for analysis, a style for client communication. But every time you start a new conversation with Claude, you're explaining it all over again or fixing the output to match your standards.

Skills solve this. Package your approach once, and Claude applies it automatically in any chat.

Before skills: You ask Claude to create a quarterly business review. Claude can already build presentations, but making them match your standards means explaining your preferences each time. You could document guidelines in a Project, but they don't automatically apply when you need them.

With skills: After creating a quarterly business review skill, you ask for the same presentation. Just by mentioning a task related to an existing skill’s name or purpose, Claude can recognize it. In this case, Claude will load your QBR skill. In Claude’s thinking you’ll see “Reading QBR skill”. It automatically applies your brand guidelines and preferred structure, generating a deck that matches your standards from the start.

Projects — You might already use Projects for certain work. Projects make sense when context accumulates over time. Think: a product launch with evolving plans, research that builds on previous findings, a campaign that unfolds over weeks. You can upload documents, build conversation history, and everything stays organized in one workspace. But Projects are bounded, and whatever context you upload to a project only exists there.

Skills work everywhere. Create a Skill once, and it's available in any conversation—regular chats, inside Projects, across all your work with Claude. Skills activate automatically when you reference them, regardless of where you're working.

Use Skills for repeatable procedures you want applied automatically—your brand guidelines, your analysis framework, your report format. Use Projects for work that needs accumulated context—a product launch, a research project, an ongoing campaign. Use both together when your work benefits from persistent context and standardized procedures.

Custom Instructions — You might also use custom instructions. These are preferences about how Claude works with you in general, like "ask clarifying questions before starting" or "keep explanations concise." They apply universally to everything Claude does for you.

Unlike custom instructions, Skills can contain far more detail. They can include extensive instructions, complete reference libraries and detailed frameworks that would otherwise clutter custom instructions.Skills are also specific to certain types of work and activate only when relevant. For example, "When creating financial models, use this validation framework" lives in a skill, as it won’t apply to everything, only financial modeling work.

Regular prompting — When you need Claude to do something once, just prompt well. Explain what you want, provide context, refine the output. This works perfectly for one-off tasks or exploratory work.

Skills work differently. They are active everywhere you work with Claude. This means you’re not re-uploading materials and re-explaining standards. Skills also combine automatically when work requires multiple areas of expertise, coordinating without you specifying each one.

Skills also unlock higher quality outputs that would be difficult to achieve through prompting alone. They can package together complete reference libraries, validation frameworks, quality standards, and proven methodologies. This built-in expertise produces results that otherwise would require extensive explanation and rounds of prompting.

Skills range from simple formatting rules to complete workflows that pull data from multiple sources, analyze it, and generate reports. Create a skill when you've figured out how you want a task done and want Claude to follow that approach consistently. This applies in different situations:

While working with Claude, you've figured out how something should be done, and find yourself explaining it to Claude multiple times. When you want Claude to follow that refined approach automatically rather than you explaining it fresh each time, that's a good skill opportunity.

Some work needs specific examples, templates, domain knowledge, or assets to meet your standards. Skills become powerful for packaging everything together so quality is consistent.

Even occasional work might require gathering multiple files or tools, explaining how they work together, coordinating different requirements. Skills eliminate the setup burden—package everything once and have it available whenever that situation arises.

Skills are available as a preview to all paid plans. To get started, navigate to Settings > Capabilities > Skills and toggle on some of the pre-built example skills. From there, when you describe a task to Claude that references a skill’s name or description, Claude recognizes it and loads the skill automatically.

Learn how to write your own custom skills, incorporating guidance from our skills best practices to understand the principles that make skills most effective.

You also don’t have to be technical to start creating skills. Try creating skills using Claude. Start by identifying a well-suited task and describing it for Claude to turn into a skill. Claude will build and structure it into a properly formatted skill file.