About Skills & Hobbies
A friendly, honest starting point for anyone wondering which hands-on job might suit them.
Skills & Hobbies helps school leavers, career changers and parents explore practical careers in the UK – the kind of work where you make, fix, build, grow, cook, style or look after things. You start with what you already have: the skills you're good at and the hobbies you enjoy. We show you which careers they point to, what those jobs are really like, what they pay and how people get in.
Where our information comes from
Our main source is the National Careers Service job profiles for England, which publish average starter and experienced salaries, typical hours and entry routes. We cross-check training details with the official apprenticeship standards published by Skills England, with GOV.UK and the T Levels site, and with the trade bodies and licensing schemes for each job – for example the Gas Safe Register, the ECS and CSCS card schemes and the Farriers Registration Council.
Every career page lists its sources and the month we checked them (currently September 2026). When an official figure doesn't exist – some jobs have no National Careers Service profile, and some profiles don't give a salary – we say so instead of filling the gap with a guess.
How the matcher works
For every career we list the skills and hobbies that help, weighted from 1 to 3. The weights are our own judgement, based on the skills and tasks in the official job profiles. The matcher adds up the weights for the things you pick and shows a score, along with the reasons behind it. The full scoring rules are published on the matcher page. It runs in your browser (or on our server if JavaScript is off) and nothing you choose is saved.
What we're not
We're an independent website. We're not part of the National Careers Service, GOV.UK, Skills England or any trade body or training provider, and we don't recruit or place people in jobs. Our guides cover England unless they say otherwise; Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own careers services and apprenticeship programmes.
How the site is funded
In future some links – for example to training courses – may be affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. This never affects the match scores or the facts we publish. Read our affiliate disclosure.
Spotted a mistake?
Pay, rules and courses change. If something looks out of date, please tell us and we'll check it against the official source.