How to scale skills across your Notion workspace

The knowledge behind good work usually lives in scattered places. A great project doc structure might live in someone’s head, your brand voice guidelines in an old doc, or a go-to prompt buried in a chat from months ago.

Skills take the know-how scattered across your team and turn it into a reusable way of working.

And because skills are Notion pages, they can live alongside your team’s docs, projects, and other work. Once shared, teammates can find and improve them as your work evolves.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Build skills your team can use

• Organize them in a shared skills database

• Decide who can access and edit them

• Manage skills at the workspace level

A good place to start is with work your team does often, where a consistent approach leads to a better result.

Look for things like:

• What process does your team repeat often? A recruiting team could create a skill for turning interview notes into a consistent candidate summary.

• Where does quality depend on following the same standards? A marketing team could share a skill that reviews customer-facing copy against its brand voice and terminology.

• What useful know-how lives with only a few people? A product team could capture how an experienced PM reviews specs for missing requirements, risks, and dependencies.

Once you’ve found work worth turning into a shared skill, see our help doc for best practices.

Your skills library is your personal view of skills. Use it to see what’s available to you and what you’ve enabled.

When your team starts sharing more skills, a skills database gives you a way to organize and maintain them together. As the collection grows, a database lets you group related skills and keep them current in one place.

When you create your first skill, Notion creates a personal skills database for you. You can keep it private or share it with your team.

Every skill is also a Notion page, so you can bring related skills together in a database. Like any other Notion database, you can add properties, control access, and organize it around what your team needs.

A skills database works like any other Notion database, with a few properties already built in:

• Description explains what the skill does and when to use it.

• Files holds supporting material like examples, reference docs, images, data files, or scripts.

• Tags help you organize and filter skills.

You can also add properties and create views to fit how your team works. For example, you might add a select property for team functions like Product Marketing, Content, and Comms, then create a view that groups skills by function.

For most teams, the simplest approach is to create one shared skills database in the teamspace where your team already works. Use it to organize the skills most relevant to your team, along with clear owners and status.

Select + next to the teamspace name and choose the skills database template. You can also create a new page and choose skills as the database type.

Start with one shared database. Create another only when there’s a clear reason, like different permissions or a separate team managing its own set of skills.

Shared skills work best when access is broad, but editing stays controlled.

Imagine your marketing team has a Brand review skill for checking copy against your brand guidelines. Everyone may need access to use it. But you might limit edit access to a few brand experts who can keep the skill aligned with your standards.

Skills have the same sharing and permission rules as any other page or database in Notion.

• Share a single skill when only a specific person or group needs it.

• Share the skills database when you want to give people access to several skills at once.

• Keep edit access limited to the people responsible for maintaining the guidance. Anyone who can edit a skill can change it for everyone who uses it.

Select Share on a skill page or skills database to adjust access.

Learn more about settings, permissions, and enabling skills in our help doc.

Once a skill becomes part of how your team works, maintain it to make sure the guidance stays current.

Take a support team with shared skills for common work it handles like reviewing macros or handling escalations. As that collection grows, keeping it organized makes the right skill easier to find and trust.

• Name each skill for the work it does: Name it after the work it does, like Review a support macro or Handle a billing escalation, instead of something broad like Support standards.

• Write a useful Description: Explain what the skill does and when to use it. This also helps Notion Agent recognize when the skill is relevant and use it automatically.

• Keep each skill focused on one job: If a skill starts covering several different jobs, split it into smaller skills that are easier to understand and maintain.

• Make it clear what’s ready to use: Add a Status property if your team needs to separate skills that are still being developed from ones that are ready to use.

Admins on Business and Enterprise plans are able to manage skills across their workspace. These controls can be found by going to Settings → Notion AI → Skills → Workspace settings.

Here are the workspace-level settings admins can manage:

• Set default skills for the workspace: Use Add default skill for skills you want everyone to have ready to use. Admins can set up to 50 default skills, so save those spots for the ones that are widely useful across the workspace.

• Control local skill downloads: A local download lets someone take a skill out of Notion and use it with a supported local agent. Allow local skill downloads is on by default. Turn it off if your team’s guidance should stay inside Notion.

• Disable skills for the workspace: Turn on Disable skills for workspace if your organization isn’t ready to use skills yet, or if you need to pause access while you review how they should be used.

Workspace settings don’t replace personal setup. Workspace members can still make some choices for themselves, so it helps to know what admins control and what stays personal.

• Members choose which shared skills to enable for themselves: Members can enable select skills for themselves from the Skills tab in their Library.

• Some placement is personal: Members can add skills to their text editor menu.

• Defaults count toward personal limits: Each member can enable up to 200 skills, with automatic use turned on for 50.

When skills are organized and maintained, your team's best ways of working stay easy to find and reuse, even as the collection grows. People can contribute and keep building on a shared foundation.