How to scale skills across your Notion workspace

Skills get more useful when they move beyond the person who created them. Shared skills make the know-how across your team easier for everyone to find and reuse.

As more people start using skills, they need to be easy to find, trust, and improve. You’ll also want clear control over who can make changes. Because skills are Notion pages, you can organize them in databases, manage access, and update them as your team changes how it works.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

• Share skills across your team

• Organize them in a shared skills database

• Decide who can access and edit them

• Manage skills at the workspace level

When you’re deciding which skills to share with your team, start with work where others would benefit from reusing the same method, standard, or expertise.

Look for things like:

• A method your team repeats: A recruiting team might use a skill to turn interview notes into the same candidate summary each time.

• A standard you want others to follow: A marketing team might use a skill to review customer-facing copy against its brand voice and terminology.

• Expertise you want to make easier to reuse: A product team might capture how an experienced PM reviews specs for missing requirements, risks, and dependencies.

Once you’ve found something worth turning into a skill, see our help doc for best practices on drafting one.

Your Skills Library is your personal view of skills in Notion. It shows the skills you've created or enabled, and the Discover tab helps you find skills others have shared across your workspace. When you find one you want to use, choose Enable for me to add it to your library.

As more people create skills across your workspace, your team may only need a small part of that larger collection. Because skills are Notion pages, you can bring the ones your team relies on into a shared skills database. This gives your team one place to organize skills and keep the most useful ones easy to find.

When you create your first skill, Notion automatically creates a private skills database for you. When you're ready to manage skills with your team, you can move them into a shared database that everyone can contribute to.

A skills database works like any other Notion database. You can add properties, create views, and organize the collection around how your team actually works.

Skills databases come with properties that help people understand what each skill is for and what it needs:

• 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 group and filter related skills.

You can add your own properties and views on top of these. 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.

Put your shared skills database in the teamspace your team already uses. That way, it’s easy to find and sits alongside the rest of your team’s shared resources.

Start with one database. 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.

Add another database when a group needs different permissions or wants to manage its own set of skills.

Shared skills work best when access is broad but editing stays controlled. Anyone who can edit a skill can change it for everyone who uses it, so keep edit access with the people responsible for keeping each skill accurate.

Say your marketing team has a Brand review skill for checking copy against your guidelines. Everyone on the team might need access to use it, but only a few brand experts should be able to change it.

Skills follow the same sharing and permission rules as any other Notion page or database. To set access, select Share on a skill or the skills database:

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

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

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

A skill is much easier to keep current when people can quickly understand what it does and when to use it. That starts with how you set it up:

• Name each skill for the work it does: Review copy for brand voice is clearer than something broad like Brand standards, especially as your collection grows.

• Write a clear Description : Say what the skill does and when to use it. Notion Agent also uses the description to decide when a skill is relevant, so being specific helps it choose the right skill automatically.

• Keep each skill focused on one job: When a skill starts covering several jobs, split it. Smaller skills are easier to understand and easier to update when the work changes.

If you're a workspace admin, you have another layer of control over how skills are used. Admins on Business and Enterprise plans can manage skills across the workspace under 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 the skills you want everyone to have ready to go. You can set up to 50, so save those spots for skills that are genuinely useful across the workspace, not just one team.

• Control local skill downloads: A local download lets someone take a skill out of Notion to use with a supported local agent. Allow local skill downloads is on by default. Turn it off if your organization wants that guidance to 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 decide how they should be used.

Admins can set workspace-wide defaults and controls, but members still manage parts of their own skills setup.

• Members choose which shared skills to enable: Outside of workspace defaults, members can browse the Discover tab in their Skills Library and turn on Enable for me for the skills they want to use.

• Members control where skills show up for them: They can add skills to their text editor menu so the ones they use often are close at hand.

• Default skills count toward personal limits: Members can enable up to 200 skills, with automatic use turned on for up to 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.