Skills Market

Skills Market

What is a Skills Market workshop?

A Skills Market enables you to learn about each other’s skills, abilities and ambitions, so you can understand how to help each other grow.

Gain a broader picture across teams of the skills and abilities you have access to, and also where people would like to improve. This encourages a culture of learning and improvement, as well as creating connections where collaboration can happen.

Follow up this session with Roles & Responsibilities for giving your team a clear understanding of each other’s role.


Skills Market Miro Template


How to run a Skills Market workshop

1. Tell everyone they are in a market, setting up a stall to buy and sell their skills.

2. On large pieces of paper, invite each participant to draw their own market stall with room for these three sections:

Current skills (that allow me to do my job)
Hidden skills (you might not know I have)
Desired skills (I want to develop or learn)

3. Remind the participants that the creative design of their market stall isn’t under judgement. Encourage them to get creative with how they draw it, as long as they leave enough room to write their skills.

4. Invite the group to independently spend some time completing each section of the stall.

5. Once complete, get each participant to stick up their skills market on a wall so its visible to the group.

6. As a group, visit each skills market and allow the marketer to share their wares. As each participant shares their market stall, encourage others to leave their initials next to the skills they can help the marketer develop, or the skills that they want to ‘buy’ and develop themselves.

7. Capture actions with Who, What, When.

Origin: Lyssa Adkins, 2010

Not sure if this is the right approach for your team at the moment? Try a different tactic for understanding the problems and challenges you face. Or if you’re happy that you know what the next big challenge is for your team, try a framing tactic to help you articulate your problem, ready for solving.

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Skills Market is one of 54 workshop recipe cards inside the Workshop Tactics card deck.

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