Why We Built SkillDrill
How a charity’s struggle to find the right volunteers led to a product now used by councils, charities, and public sector organisations across the UK.
A volunteer, a spreadsheet, and £300 a month
A mid-sized charity was paying an agency £300 a month to run two social media posts a week. One of their Saturday shop volunteers ran social media professionally, working across three brands with a following of 40,000 of her own. She had been volunteering for four months. Nobody had ever asked what she did for a living.
That’s not a one-off story. It’s the normal state of most organisations. You know people’s job titles. You rarely know what they can actually do, especially the parts of their life that happen outside work or outside their formal role.
SkillDrill exists to close that gap, without turning it into another form nobody finishes.
The charity in that story relied on around two hundred volunteers: retired teachers, off-duty nurses, ex-military, students, tradespeople, professionals between jobs. They knew exactly how many volunteers they had. What they couldn’t tell you was what any of those people were capable of beyond the role they’d signed up for.
Sample data. Skills like these stay invisible until someone asks.
We were paying an agency to run our social media. Three hundred pounds a month for two posts a week. Turns out one of our Saturday shop volunteers runs social media for a living. She manages accounts for three brands and has 40k followers of her own. She’d been pricing up handbags for four months and nobody thought to ask.
A charity manager. The conversation that started SkillDrill.
Everything else had already been tried
Spreadsheets
The volunteer coordinator kept one. It had columns for "skills" and "interests." Most rows said "happy to help" or were blank. It lived on a laptop that went home every night.
Induction Forms
New volunteers filled one in on day one. Ticked boxes for availability and DBS status. Nobody asked what they did for a living, what languages they spoke, or what professional qualifications they held.
Word of Mouth
The only reliable way to find someone with a specific skill was to ask around. Which worked fine until the one person who knew everyone went on holiday, changed role, or left.
The answer was already happening in tea rooms
The volunteer coordinators who actually knew what their people could do didn’t use any system. They just talked to them.
A cup of tea and "So what did you do before you started volunteering here?" would turn into "Oh you were a bookkeeper? We’ve been struggling with our Gift Aid claims for months."
Those conversations changed everything. But one coordinator can know fifty people. A charity with two hundred volunteers across multiple sites? The knowledge just evaporated.
So we built an AI that could have that conversation with every single volunteer. Not a survey. A genuine conversation that follows up, probes, and captures the detail that matters. That idea became AI Conversations, the heart of SkillDrill.
What do you do outside of volunteering?
I’m a freelance content creator. I run Instagram and TikTok for a couple of small businesses, and I do a bit of photography on the side.
That’s brilliant. What tools do you use? Canva, CapCut, anything like that?
Canva, CapCut, Premiere Pro, Lightroom. I also know Mailchimp really well. I set up email campaigns for a local bakery that doubled their repeat orders...
- Social Media captured with tools and real examples
- Video Editing and Photography surfaced from one answer
- Email Marketing logged, searchable across the organisation
Sample data: skills captured automatically from conversation
Encrypted by default
Per-tenant encryption with your data isolated under your own key, the standard expected of policing systems.
GDPR compliant from day one
Data protection built into the design from the first line of code, not patched on afterwards.
A human decides
AI surfaces information. A person in your organisation decides what happens next. Always.
Per-tenant encryption. Your data, your key.
Built, hosted, and supported in Britain.
No VC funding. No exit plan. Just building.
Frontline to boardroom. All skills matter.
- Over a decade in law enforcement and public sector technology
- Builds secure systems where data protection failures aren’t an option
- Writes SkillDrill’s code himself, security first
Built on public sector experience
SkillDrill’s founder has spent over a decade working as a technology specialist across law enforcement and public sector organisations, building secure systems for environments where getting data protection wrong isn’t an option.
That background shapes how SkillDrill is built: encrypted by default, GDPR compliant from day one, and designed so that AI never makes a decision about a person. It only surfaces information. A human decides what happens next.
My background is in building secure systems for organisations where data really matters. I’ve spent years working with police forces, in the UK and internationally, along with local government and public sector bodies, building platforms that handle sensitive information and have to work properly from day one. That’s the world I come from.
When AI started becoming genuinely useful, not the hype but the actual technology, I kept thinking about where it could do real good. Not chatbots on websites. Not generating marketing copy (ironic, as I used AI to help me write this). Something that would make a tangible difference to how organisations work.
The answer came from a charity I was helping. They had incredible people volunteering for them, but no way of knowing what those people could really do. A volunteer with a graphic design degree was making teas. Someone with ten years of social media experience was folding clothes. Not because they didn’t want to help more, but because nobody had ever asked.
"Does anyone know how to use Canva? We need a poster by Friday."
"Our social media hasn’t been updated in weeks. Is there anyone who could help?"
"We need photos for the annual report. Does anyone here own a decent camera?"
That’s where AI comes into its own. Not replacing people, but having the conversation that surfaces what they can do, at a scale no coordinator or manager could ever match alone. And because of my background in secure systems, I could build it the right way: encrypted, isolated, GDPR compliant, the kind of data handling I’d expect from a policing system applied to workforce skills.
SkillDrill is the result. It combines the thing I know best, which is secure, production-grade software, with the thing AI does best: having genuine, adaptive conversations that draw out information people didn’t even think to share, in an ethical way.
If any of this resonates, I’d genuinely like to hear from you. No pitch, just a conversation about whether this could help.
What we believe
People are more capable than their job title suggests.
Most organisations have no reliable way to find that out.
AI should surface information, not make decisions about people.
SkillDrill never scores, ranks, or grades anyone.
A concern raised by a person deserves a response from a person.
Anything sensitive that comes up in a conversation goes straight to someone in your organisation, not to an algorithm.
Security isn’t a feature you bolt on later.
It’s the foundation everything else is built on.
One conversation became a platform
What started as a way to have that tea-room conversation at scale now covers the whole journey: from the first chat to finding people, building teams, and supporting them over time.
The company behind SkillDrill
SkillDrill is built and operated by Fully Coded Solutions Limited, registered in England and Wales, Company No. 8649718.
Fully Coded Solutions is independent: no venture funding and no exit plan, just a product being built carefully for the organisations that use it.
SkillDrill is built, hosted, and supported in the UK, on the same security-first foundations its founder spent a decade building for law enforcement and public sector organisations.
- Company
- Fully Coded Solutions Limited
- Registered
- England and Wales
- Company No.
- 8649718
- Product
- SkillDrill
- Built & hosted
- United Kingdom
Find out what your people can actually do
Book a demo and we’ll walk you through how SkillDrill surfaces the skills already sitting inside your organisation.