Lesson 2.2 of the Free Claude Cowork Course · 25 minutes
Overview
By now you’ve written some good briefs — and probably noticed you’d hate to retype them every week. Skills solve that: a skill is a saved set of instructions for a multi-step workflow, triggered with a single command. This lesson turns your best brief into a skill, which is the difference between using Cowork and having a system.
What You’ll Do
- Understand what plugins and skills are and when each is worth creating
- Turn a brief from Module 1 into a reusable skill, in plain language
- Run it, refine it, and run it again — the improvement loop
The Lesson
Say “start lesson 2.2”. A skill is written the way you’d write instructions for a new colleague: here’s the goal, here are the steps, here’s what good output looks like, here’s where things go. You’ll draft one from the meeting-prep or reporting brief you built earlier, save it into the course folder’s skills structure, and trigger it. It won’t be perfect on the first run — that’s designed into the lesson. You’ll adjust one instruction, run it again, and watch the output improve, which teaches the maintenance habit every durable workflow needs.
Try It Now
Create a skill for the most repetitive task in your week — even a modest one. Run it twice with one refinement in between. This skill becomes a candidate for your team’s shared library in lesson 2.4.
What’s Next
← Previous: 2.1 Connectors
Next: 2.3 Team Context Folder →
New here? Download the full course free on GitHub.
Rolling this out for a whole team? See our live team training.