Skills plan

Make a skills plan

Pick a workplace and a skill and get a plan: workdays to try, small real-world practice steps, tools and further learning (free and paid options), and one next move. Start with a suggestion, or choose your own.

A few good places to start

Choose my own workplace and skill

Step 1 · Choose a workplace

Step 2 · Choose a skill

Your plan

Self-advocacy at Fenmore Line 4

Saying what you need, want, don't understand or won't do — and choosing how.

Add this focus to my Spark guide

Not the same as: Only complaining about unfair treatment. Asking for something to do is self-advocacy too.

Workdays to walk through

Workday 01 · Eleven Minutes
Monday · 5:52 AM
The guard on Press 4 sticks if you close it properly. Everyone bypasses it. Today it's your hands near the die.
Where self-advocacy shows up: A sticking safety guard puts production pressure and your working conditions in tension.
Enter workday Read the lesson
Workday 02 · The Ninety-Second Handover
Wednesday · 5:50 AM
Nothing is on fire. There's just a repetitive check, a handover note nobody quite reads, and eight hours of staying awake to a job that mostly runs itself.
Enter workday
Workday 03 · After the Trucks Left
Friday · 2:14 PM
A customer flagged out-of-tolerance housings — from a batch that already shipped. The dates on the boxes point straight at your run on Press 4.
Enter workday

Practice steps

Choose a step that fits your situation. Mark a step when you have tried it in a setting that fits your life — at work, in a class, while volunteering, caregiving, in your community or in a practice conversation. Nobody is grading this.

The same skill somewhere else

Food processing · Grading and packing line

Harrow Plain Packhouse

The Truck at Eleven

Instructions to speed up grading conflict with the specification you were trained to follow.

Enter workday

Retail — home goods

Rise & Co. Homeware

The Return

An unusual return raises the question of when to ask a manager for guidance.

Enter workday