Summer Skills Prove Popular This Christmas

Summer Skills Prove Popular This Christmas

Learning to surf and being able to cook the perfect barbecue were the two most popular skills given as gifts this Christmas. That’s according to a New Zealand website, www.giftofskill.co.nz, that sells gift vouchers for people to learn new skills.

According to Gift of Skill’s founder, Ben Rickard, “both of these skills are highly aspirational. Lots of people would love to be able to say ‘yeah I surf’, or have the satisfaction of knowing they can get up on a board. The excuse is always finding the time to learn, or not knowing where to start.

“And for Kiwi men, it’s almost expected that you can handle a pair barbeque tongs and a fish slice from birth.” For many that expectation is intimidating, poorly seasoned, over cooked or under cooked meat can be a social disaster, it’s highly embarrassing and can hit a man’s delicate ego hard. “We believe that’s one of the reasons why our Perfect Barbecue Skills lessons were so popular as gifts this Christmas, with wives buying the lessons for their husbands.”

Gift of Skill’s premise is that there’s plenty of things we all wish we could do, but not many of us ever get around to actually learning them. By giving that first lesson as a gift you’re making it much easier for someone to take that first step. Who knows, it could be the start of a rewarding hobby, a new career or simply be a fun and unique experience.

Skills such as cheesemaking, dancing, sailing, a range of sports including windsurfing, golf and tennis, hobbies, crafts such as sewing and embroidery, music and singing lessons, personal styling, driving, cooking skills and car and home maintenance are all available through Gift of Skill.

With Gift of Skill, all a person needs to do once they’ve received their voucher (which you can buy from www.giftofskill.co.nz) is go to the website, choose the skill they want to learn and the Gift of Skill team will do the rest. “We find a local skill expert and match them to the voucher recipient to arrange their introductory lesson. After that it’s up to the customer to decide if they want to carry on and arrange further lessons, but that’s the easy part.”

Rounding out the top five skills purchased as gifts this Christmas were:

1 = Perfect Barbecue Skills

1 = Surfing Skills

3 = Singing Skills

4 = $100 Gift of Skill Voucher – All Skills (the recipient gets to pick what they want to learn)

5 = Martial Arts

You can visit www.giftofskill.co.nz to see what it’s all about, join Gift of Skill on Facebook and contact Ben by email (ben@giftofskill.co.nz) if you have a skill that you want to offer.

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