Skills & goals

Why Skills & Goals matter

Your Skills to Teach and Skills to Learn are the core of how SkillSwap understands you. They shape your matches, your visibility, and the kind of people you’ll be recommended to.

A well-defined set of skills and goals leads to better match scores, more relevant session requests, and faster progress across all areas you learn.

Where to edit your skills

You can update your skills anytime by opening your profile on SkillSwap. Skills appear in two separate sections:

• Skills to Teach
• Skills to Learn

Skills to Teach

These are the skills you feel comfortable helping others with. They don’t require professional certification — you simply need enough real-world experience to guide someone through a problem or share meaningful insights.

• Programming basics or advanced technologies
• Languages you speak fluently
• Creative skills like design, music or photography
• Professional skills such as marketing, sales or finance

Teaching earns you Skill Points (SP), which you can spend on your own learning sessions. Even one teaching skill dramatically increases how often you appear to others.

Tips for choosing what to teach

• Pick skills you genuinely enjoy explaining.
• Choose topics where you can provide examples or personal insights.
• Start with 1–3 skills — you can always expand your list later as you grow.

Skills to Learn

These define what kind of learners and tutors SkillSwap should connect you with. Add the skills you want to improve — from technical abilities to soft skills to new hobbies.

The more precise your learning goals are, the better the Matches page becomes.

Examples of great learning goals

• “Learn Figma basics and get feedback on UI layouts.”
• “Improve conversational English for business calls.”
• “Understand JavaScript async patterns with real examples.”

How the matching system uses your skills

SkillSwap’s matching algorithm cross-checks your teach/learn skills with other users’ profiles using multiple factors:

• Skills you want to learn vs. skills others teach
• Skills you teach vs. what others want to learn
• Languages you share
• Timezone proximity
• User reliability, responsiveness and activity

The more aligned your skills are, the higher the match score. Learn more in Match scores explained.

How often should you update your skills?

Your goals may evolve over time. SkillSwap encourages you to update your skills when:

• You’ve mastered a topic and want new challenges
• You want to explore a new field
• You’ve gained a new skill and are ready to teach it

Every time you update your skills, your Matches feed refreshes automatically.

Next steps

Once you’ve set up your skills and goals, you’re ready to explore your matches and start scheduling sessions.

👉 Book your first session