The Skills Bank aims to connect, share, trade and develop skills in voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations.

The Skills Bank helps to pool skills enabling people to work together in spirit of trust and generosity, sharing skills and other resources for everyone’s benefit.

Skills Bank was developed in partnership with the Councils for Voluntary Services (CVS) Network and has now expanded to create wider regional accounts.

How it works

Skills Bank is an online searchable data-base. It is a bank where the currency used is not money but the skill that exists among member organisations’ staff and or volunteers.

There is no hierarchy of skills, all skills are valuable resources and are treated equally. In this aspect of the bank ‘credits’ are measured in time spent by staff and committee members on providing training, shadowing and mentoring etc and is ‘banked’ in the database. These credits can then be used to ‘purchase’ skills from other members of the bank at a later date.

Members can accumulate up to 35 hours of debits by using the training services of other members. Don’t forget to think about, reasonable travel time, particularly in rural areas, for the credit and debit calculations.

User access is via member accounts so only people or organisations that are part of the bank in that area can access the account.

Overtime the aim is to create a network of overlapping ‘circles’ within which local members can trade with each other. Members can look beyond their own circle where required to ‘import’ unique skills and knowledge.

Each user account is self-managed by members. Members requesting access to the skills of another member should coordinate with the named person on that organisations’ account or champion. The champion has overall responsibility for the skills training on their own organisations’ behalf.

In some circumstances, member organisations may choose to buy training services from each other. In that event the exchange of finance is a private matter between those organisations and no records of those transactions will be recorded in Skills Bank account records. Members may advertise such services and the relevant financial charges within their personal account details published on the site.