10 Skill Building Activities

Address skill gaps and develop new skill sets among your team through fun and effective skill building activities. We’ve listed our top suggested ones for you to explore and try. Check them out below. 

1. Chat Simulation

Chat simulation focusing on developing communication skills is another fun skill building activity that you can consider for your team. To create an interactive learning experience for them, you can imitate real-world situations or conversations where they can practice their communication skills. 

For example, to train your customer service representatives about risk management, you can create lessons where you ask them possible questions about certain issues. Then, they can choose the appropriate response from a set of answer options. This way, they’ll be prepared for any kind of issue that might pop up. At the same time, they’re able to gain knowledge on how to respond during such situations. 

This is made so easy with SC Training (formerly EdApp)! You can create your own chat simulation lesson in its course creation tool where you’ll find 80+ interactive training templates. Among them is the Chat Template, a multiple-choice template that uses speech bubbles to interact with the learner. It’s perfect for simulating conversations with customers, especially for industries like sales, retail, and so on.

Join SC Training (formerly EdApp) for free today and create interactive lessons for your team! 

2. Case Studies Presentation

Presenting case studies is a skill building activity that focuses on analyzing real data and information from real experiences involving significant clients and customers. Here, your learners take a look at the issues and problems encountered, challenge themselves to think out of the box and gather insights to come up with alternative solutions. It doesn’t only promote collaboration among employees, but it also further strengthens their analytical skills, strategic skills, decision-making skills, and creativity. 

3. Customer Role-Play

Customer role play is an activity where scenarios are recreated to train employees on how to act and deal with various types of customers. It’s an engaging building skill activity where your employees can actively participate in their training. Through this, they’ll not only be able to improve their communication skills. They’ll also be able to practice certain behaviors, processes, and tasks, making them more precise when handling customers. 

4. Hackathon

A hackathon is a kind of event common in tech companies where employees group themselves together to work on a project. The programmers of the team will then code the project within 24 hours (with barely or no sleep at all!) and then present them to everyone. For instance, the highlight of the event can be about developing new software features, solving customers’ challenges, etc. 

It’s a fun activity where your employees can socialize and learn at the same time. And most importantly, your employees will be pushed to go beyond their limits, think creatively, and create teamwork–all thanks to the competitive nature of such events. 

5. Sell Me This Item

Another fun skill building activity for your team is called “Sell Me This Item”, which is also known as “Sell Me This Pen”. Using any item in the room, you can choose any item that participating employees can sell. Or, to make things more exciting, they select the items themselves. Once that is set, they’ll be required to create a marketing strategy. You can even use this activity to create friendly competition among employees to motivate them to do their best.

Here, the item they’ll need to market can be so common or unusual. If your team has been used to traditional marketing methods, this activity will help them shift their perspective and explore strategies outside of the conventional ones. This way, they can loosen up a bit and learn to be more creative again. 

6. Illustrating Customer Persona

A skill building activity ideal for industries involving a variety of customers is illustrating a customer persona. In this activity, your team will identify the types of customers for each challenge or pain point that your product or service solves. Then, they’ll create a pseudo-persona for them, highlighting their psychology, personalities, and behaviors based on factual data and information. This will help your team gain a deeper understanding of your clients or customers, which can then improve their service for them.  

7. Fact or Opinion

If you want to increase your team’s knowledge about the business, an activity you can do is list down facts or opinions related to your company. When a statement is true, the challenge for the participating employees is to prove it. When it’s an opinion, their task will be to determine how they could be assumed by some people. This activity is designed to help your team stay grounded on factual information as well as to filter out irrelevant information. 

8. Trivia Quizzes

If you prefer an activity that’s more fun and light-hearted, then solving trivia quizzes is the right skill building activity for your team. You can pick a variety of themes for your questions–they could be about your clients, your operations, the company, and so on. This way, you can keep their knowledge up-to-date, particularly with workplace trivia that tend to be overlooked. 

9. Virtual Reality (VR) Training

Virtual Reality (VR) training is an immersive learning experience, which gives your employees hands-on training on tasks that can be risky or dangerous when performed right away in a real setting. It’s especially relevant if they still lack the necessary knowledge and expertise to perform such tasks. So, to help in improving their skills, this type of activity makes use of VR equipment to make the learning experience more realistic. It’s mostly common in fields like aviation, healthcare, and other similar industries. 

10. Cross-Department Training

Cross-department training can help your team become more familiar with the duties and responsibilities of other departments. You can accomplish this by job shadowing, job switching, or by setting up activities that will enable them to work together on a particular assignment.

It’s a good activity for your employees to expand their expertise and develop more relevant skills. Not only that, but it can also help streamline your business process since employees will have a better understanding of the roles of other departments and get an idea of how they can collaborate with them. When everyone understands their respective roles, you won’t ever have to worry when someone is absent due to illness or leave because you have a capable team to fill in.