Trainer FAQ
Common questions from trainers and coaches considering a Skillyard listing. If your question isn't here, drop us a note through the contact page.
What is Skillyard and what do I get from listing?
Skillyard is a national online directory of independent UK training and coaching businesses. Listing your business puts you in front of buyers who are actively searching for training in your subject area and region. Buyers browse categories, use filters and search and contact you directly through the details on your listing. There is no middleman and no commission on any work that follows.
How much does it cost?
A Skillyard listing costs £7.99 per month, or £79 per year if paid annually. That is the whole cost. There are no additional fees for enquiries, no commission on bookings and no charges for featured placement. There is also no upselling of any kind, we won't try to sell you a website or pepper you with calls from a call centre. The subscription funds the site and keeps Skillyard independent of the trainers listed on it.
How do I sign up?
Sign-up is through the List Your Business page. You fill in the details of your listing, submit it for review and pay the monthly or annual subscription. Once approved, your listing goes live and you can edit or update it at any time from your dashboard.
What are the requirements for listing?
Skillyard is for independent UK training and coaching businesses, whatever their size. Sole traders, small partnerships and larger independent training companies all qualify, including independent providers who deliver government-funded training such as apprenticeships, because they are independent providers in their own right. What doesn't fit are institutional and public-sector bodies themselves, such as further education colleges, universities and council-run courses. Aggregator marketplaces and lead-generation platforms aren't listed either, as they are not training providers, nor are businesses whose main activity is something other than training.
What does the approval process involve?
Every listing goes through a manual review by a real person. We check that the business or individual is real, that the listing fits the independent criteria and that details are accurate and complete. Listings that are missing essential information, or are not appropriate for this index, will be returned to you with feedback. You can then either update and submit again, or reassess the suitability of Skillyard for your business.
Why is there an approval process?
To protect the quality of the index. Skillyard is human-curated, which means every listing is checked by a person before it goes live. That is what makes the site different to the automated directories that search engines have learned to discount. As Skillyard stays clean and trustworthy, search engines and LLMs build confidence in it and that confidence flows to every listing on it. The stronger the index, the more valuable it is for every business listed on it. The approval process is there to quality high and put out strong trust signals to the search engines and AI searches.
How long does approval take?
We aim to review new listings within 24 hours. Edge cases where we need to check something with you can take a bit longer. If you haven't heard back within a couple of days, get in touch through the contact page and we'll chase it up.
What information do I need to provide?
A listing includes your business name, a short tagline, a short description and a longer one, your specialism, the categories and sub-categories that fit your work, your home region and service areas, the delivery formats you offer, contact details and website, and a logo. Sample courses are optional but useful. Our guide on writing a listing that converts covers each element in detail.
If I add my email and phone number, will I get targeted by spammers?
We take steps to protect against it. The email and phone number on your listing are hidden from the automated bots that crawl the web harvesting contact details, which is what causes most of the spam people complain about. A real buyer sees your email and phone as normal and can click straight through to contact you, but the details are scrambled in the underlying HTML so the bots that scrape addresses in bulk don't pick them up. We should be honest that no method is completely foolproof, a determined scraper targeting one specific address can still get through, but this defeats the mass automated harvesting that causes the flood of spam, so you're far better protected than on a site that lists contact details in the open.
Can I edit my listing after it goes live?
Yes. Everything is edited from your business dashboard. Once your site is live, it stays live even if you make edits, but all edits are also checked in teh background by our human reviewers. This is just to make sure that anyone trying to trick the system by submitting an innocuous listing to begin with, but then editing it to spam all categories and all regions, for example, gets picked up. Everything we do is about ensuring the buyer searching for a training provider is getting a valuable service.
Does Skillyard take a cut of work generated?
No. Skillyard we designed to be a pure index of training providers. There's no system in place to to intervene in deals. Skillyard is funded by subscriptions and takes nothing from any work that follows. A buyer reaches your business via the contact details and Skillyard's involvement ends there.
Can I see which buyers have shortlisted me?
No. Buyers can save trainers to a private shortlist to help them compare and come back to their favourites, but that shortlist is theirs alone. It's stored only in their own browser, it isn't recorded by us and no trainer can see who has shortlisted them. We keep it private on purpose, as buyers are more comfortable browsing and shortlisting when they know they're not being tracked, which means more of them use the index and more of them reach out to you.
How does ranking work?
The order in which listings appear on category pages shuffles daily. Every listing gets a fair share of the top positions over time. Filters and search work against the same shuffled order. Trainers cannot pay to rank higher and the shuffle is designed to prevent any single trainer from dominating the results permanently. We've done this because we want buyers to find the right trainers for them, not just the ones who could pay the most to get their listing to the top.
Can I pay to be featured or promoted?
No. Skillyard doesn't offer paid featured placement, sponsored listings or promotional tiers. Every trainer pays the same annual or monthly subscription and gets the same visibility. This is deliberate. Paid placement rewards budget over fit and buyers see through it quickly. Even ground for everyone protects the credibility of the site for the buyers we're trying to attract.
What if I want to pause or remove my listing?
You can unpublish your listing at any time from your dashboard. This hides it from buyers without deleting your data, which is useful if you're taking a break, on parental leave or fully booked. You can also delete your listing entirely if you're closing the business or want to leave the site. Subscription payments run to the end of the paid period and are not refunded pro rata.
What kind of buyers use Skillyard?
UK businesses looking for training and coaching. Training managers, HR and L&D professionals, owner-managers, department heads and anyone else in a business who has been given the job of finding the right training for their team. The mix runs from small independent businesses through mid-sized companies and up into larger organisations that prefer independent trainers over marketplaces.
How do buyers find me?
Several routes. Category browsing, which surfaces trainers who fit the buyer's subject need. Search, which handles free-text queries. The finder, which calls an AI to make sense of what the buyer needs and deliver the right listings. Combo pages for cities and categories, which surface trainers via location-plus-subject searches. And also the wider web and AI and traditional search, because your Skillyard listing is indexed by Google and other search engines and shows up in general searches for trainers in your area.
Can I show that I'm listed on my own website?
Yes. Once your listing is live, your dashboard gives you a set of Skillyard badges to add to your own website. Each one links straight back to your listing, so a visitor to your site can follow it through and it signals that you're part of a vetted index. There are light and dark versions to suit any site and you can either copy a snippet to paste in or download the image to add through a website builder like Wix or Squarespace. It's a small thing that gives buyers another route to you and quietly reinforces that you've been checked and listed.
What if a buyer contact turns out to be low quality?
Skillyard doesn't screen buyer enquiries. You get the buyer's message directly and can decide whether it fits your work. Most enquiries are genuine. Occasionally you might get something that isn't a real buyer, whether that's someone fishing for information, an aggregator scraping the site, or an unrelated pitch. If a contact turns out to be spam or abusive, let us know through the contact page and we'll take a look. Our guide on what to do when a lead goes cold covers the more common scenario of a genuine enquiry that stalls.