Guide · method
Skill Swap Activity Methodology: Objectives, Providers, Assessment
Most attempts to plan a skill swap activity die at the same point: somebody has a good intention, several people agree it is a good intention, and then no date is ever fixed. A skill swap activity methodology is just the set of decisions that turns the intention into something on a calendar.
The skill swap activity methodology below has five steps and is written to be worked through in an afternoon. Read it once before you plan a skill swap activity of your own, then use it as a checklist rather than a manual.
It applies whether you are inside one organisation, across several, or simply in a town where people know each other well enough to turn up.
It is also worth saying what a skill swap activity is not. It is not training. Nobody is certified at the end, the material is not signed off by anyone, and the person teaching is a peer who happens to know the thing. That informality is the whole advantage — it makes the activity cheap enough to repeat — and it is why the methodology below spends more effort on finding providers and setting objectives than on curriculum.
Step One: Set the Bases
Before objectives, before speakers, settle four facts and write them down: who this is for, how often it happens, where, and who is responsible when nobody else does anything. That last one is the load-bearing decision. In the archive on this site, every group that held sessions had one or two named curators, and the group that had members but no named curator held nothing at all.
Frequency is the second trap. Monthly is easier to sustain than weekly and much easier than “when we have something good”, because an unscheduled activity has to be re-decided every single time. Every re-decision is a chance for the thing not to happen, and the number of those chances is what actually determines whether a series survives its first year.
Who it is for is the decision people get wrong most often, because the instinct is to be welcoming and the requirement is to be specific. An activity for “anyone interested in design” cannot have a talk pitched at any particular level, so it gets talks pitched at beginners, so the people who could have spoken next month stop coming. An activity for a named trade in a named town can have a talk that assumes shared vocabulary, and that is the only kind of talk a peer can give without preparing for a month.
Step Two: Define Your Objectives, Narrowly
Vague objectives produce vague sessions. “Share knowledge” is not an objective; “three people in this team can do the thing only one person can currently do” is. Write objectives you could be wrong about, because those are the only ones assessment can later check.
Two or three objectives per activity is plenty, and they do not all have to be about skills. A legitimate objective is that people who work in the same building meet each other, which is frequently the outcome that survives longest. The subjects in the Brighton archive range from typography to physical computing, but the consistent objective across a decade was simpler than any of them: keep the room meeting.
It is also worth being honest that objectives shift once the thing is running. Companies find this too. The Guardian published a piece in 2015 on the advantages of skill swaps and the possibility of growing a business through them, which is a long way from where most of these arrangements start.
Step Three: Choose the Knowledge Providers
Knowledge providers is a clumsy phrase for the people who will actually stand up and talk, and the recruiting rule is counter-intuitive: pick the person whose knowledge is most ordinary to them. People systematically undervalue what they do daily, which is exactly why it is worth hearing.
Ask two providers per session rather than one. It halves the request, it covers you if somebody withdraws, and across 19 documented evenings it is the format that stuck —47 talks from 42 speakers, almost always two to a night.
Where you find them: the room itself. Several of the speakers in the archive had never given a talk anywhere before. Ask somebody directly, after a session, while they are still in the building — a general call for volunteers reliably produces silence.
The reason a direct ask works and an open call does not is worth understanding, because it determines how you spend your effort. An open call requires somebody to decide, unprompted, that their own work is interesting enough to occupy a room. Almost nobody concludes that about themselves. A direct ask moves that judgement to you, and “I think the thing you did with that data would make a good twenty minutes” is a far easier proposition to accept than “would you like to speak”.
Two failure modes to watch for. The first is the provider who is too senior: a person brought in because their name carries weight will give a talk they have given before, which is a conference booking rather than an exchange. The second is the provider who agrees and then over-prepares, arrives with fifty slides and runs to an hour. Both are fixed by being concrete up front about the length and the informality, and by saying that nothing shown has to be finished.
Step Four: Run the Skill Swap Activity
Keep it short. Twenty to thirty minutes a talk, two talks, and time afterwards that is not programmed. The unprogrammed part is not padding: it is where the exchange the activity is named after actually happens, and cutting it to fit a third speaker is the most common way a good evening is spoiled.
Start within ten minutes of the advertised time even if the room is half empty. Nothing teaches people that a fixture is real faster than it starting without them once.
Record it if you can. Ten of the talks in this archive have surviving recordings and those are the only ones that can still be heard at all, which is a reasonable argument for a phone on a stand from the first session onwards.
Leave the last twenty minutes unprogrammed and defend that space as if it were a session, because it is the one part of the evening the format exists to produce. Two talks are the excuse for the room; the conversation afterwards is what people come back for. The most common way an organiser damages their own event is by filling that slot with a third speaker, an announcement block or a tidy-up that starts too early.
One more thing about running it: introduce the speakers yourself, briefly, and say why you asked them. Ten seconds of “I asked her because of the thing she built last spring” does more for a nervous first-time speaker than any amount of reassurance beforehand, and it tells the room what kind of question is welcome.
Step Five: Assessment Without Forms
Assessment here does not mean feedback forms, which mostly measure politeness. Go back to the objectives from step two and ask whether they happened. If the objective was that three people can now do a thing, ask them to do it. If it was that people meet each other, count how many stayed after the second talk.
The single most useful assessment question is whether anybody in the room volunteered to speak next time. A skill swap activity that produces its own next providers is self-sustaining; one that does not will need the organiser to find speakers indefinitely, and that is the version that stops after three sessions. The Bristol group is a documented instance of exactly that ending.
Working the Methodology in an Afternoon
The five steps above are not a project plan, and treating them as one is how a skill swap activity acquires a steering group and then never happens. Here is the compressed version, which is how it is actually done.
Write down who it is for, in one sentence naming a trade and a place. Write down the frequency and the room. Write down the name of the person responsible. Write two objectives you could be wrong about. Then stop planning and ask two people, because every remaining question answers itself once a date exists and two names are attached to it.
The reason this works is that most of what looks like planning is actually deferral. The venue question is genuinely hard until you accept an adequate room; the format question is hard until you accept two talks; the promotion question is hard until you accept that the first few evenings are people you already know. None of those are solved by more discussion.
What does need real thought is the objectives, and specifically writing ones that can turn out false. “Build community” cannot be assessed and so cannot teach you anything. “Two people who attend will offer to speak within three months” can, and if it turns out false you have learned the most useful thing available: that your room is an audience rather than a set of peers, and that the invitation list is the thing to change.