Trainer FAQ

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 is free for life if you submit it for review by 8th November 2026. There is no card to enter and no subscription to cancel. Your listing stays free after that date, while new listings open at an early-bird rate of £8 per month or £80 per year, with the standard price of £16 per month or £160 per year after that. That is the whole cost either way. 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.

What if I can't afford the monthly price?

Listings submitted for review by 8th November 2026 are free for life, so cost is not a barrier at the moment. When pricing begins, early bird is £8 a month, half the standard price, and stays with your listing for as long as it is live. Once early bird closes and the standard price of £16 a month applies, we will offer starter places: half price for six months, for new businesses and sole traders who find the standard price a barrier.

Related: Starter places

Why isn't Skillyard free for everyone?

Listings submitted for review by 8th November 2026 are free for life, as a thank you for helping us launch. After that every new listing pays a monthly or annual subscription. Free directories rarely do you any good. Anyone can list anything on an open free site. There are no checks, so buyers learn not to trust what they find there. So do search engines and AI assistants. Skillyard is human-curated. Every listing is checked by a person before it goes live to confirm the business is real and fits the categories it has chosen. That checking is what makes a Skillyard listing valuable for buyers browsing the site, and for AI tools reading it. Without paying members, we wouldn't be able to maintain the directory.

How do I sign up?

Sign-up is through the List Your Business page. You fill in the details of your listing and submit it for review. Founder listings are free, so there is nothing to pay. Once it passes review your listing goes live and you can edit or update it any time from your dashboard.

Related: List your business

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, 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.

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.

Related: How we verify listings

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 keep 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 and a long description, your specialism and the categories and sub-categories that fit your work. It also carries your home town, which sets your county and region, the areas you cover, your delivery formats and a logo, plus your website and contact details. Sample courses are optional but useful. Once you have signed up, the guide in your dashboard covers each element in detail.

Can my listing appear in more than one category?

Yes. You can choose up to five categories and as many sub-categories within them as fit your work, and your listing appears on the page for each one. You also pick one of them as your main category, which shows in your listing's page title and breadcrumb, so choose the one that best describes what you do.

Should I choose as many categories as I can?

No. Choose only the subjects you deliver yourself and that are described on your own website. When a buyer asks the finder or an AI assistant for a trainer, it matches what they need against the categories and sub-categories on each listing. If you tick subjects you don't cover, you will be put forward for work you can't deliver. The buyer gets in touch, finds the fit is wrong and moves on, and the assistant that recommended you has given them a poor answer, which makes it less likely to trust the listing next time. Accurate choices do the opposite and put you in front of buyers whose needs match your work, which is where enquiries turn into bookings. We check every category against your website when we review your listing, and we send back listings that tick far more than the business offers.

Related: How we verify listings

If I add my email and phone number, will I get targeted by spammers?

It shouldn't make much difference. Buyers see your email and phone on your listing page as normal and can contact you with a click. The details aren't written into the page as plain text, so the simple bots that scrape pages for addresses don't pick them up and contact details aren't included in the API or the structured data. No method is foolproof and a determined scraper can still find them, but it cuts out the lazy bulk harvesting that causes most spam. An AI assistant recommending you will send the buyer to your listing or your website, where your details are.

Can I edit my listing after it goes live?

Yes. Everything is edited from your business dashboard. Once your listing is live, it stays live even if you make edits, but all edits are also checked in the 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 good service, because that's what makes Skillyard a valuable search resource.

Does Skillyard take a cut of work generated?

No. Skillyard is designed to be a pure index of training providers. There's no system in place 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, because 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.

Related: How we rank

Can I pay to be featured or promoted?

No. Skillyard doesn't offer paid featured placement, sponsored listings or promotional tiers. Every listing gets the same visibility whatever its owner pays. 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, founders, 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. AI assistants and agents, which can search Skillyard directly through its open API and recommend your listing when someone asks them for a trainer like you. And the wider web, because your Skillyard listing is indexed by Google and other search engines and shows up in general searches for trainers offering what you offer.

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.