Introduction: Skills, training and development: an introduction to the social life of skills in the global South 1. Skilling Indigenous futures: crafts and resilience among the Paiwan people of Taiwan 2. Becoming a repair entrepreneur: an ethnography of skills training in Brazil 3. Skills in ‘unskilled’ work: a case of waste work in Central India 4. Skills to stay: social processes in agricultural skill acquisition in rural Karnataka 5. Rationalising pedagogy: what counts as skill across musical communities of practice in contemporary Istanbul 6. Training for employment or skilling up from employment? Jobs and skills acquisition in the Tiruppur textile region, India 7. H?th se s?khna: geographies of practical learning and India’s agricultural skills agenda 8. Crafting new service workers: skill training, migration and employment in Bengaluru, India 9. Of glass, skills and life: trade consciousness among Firozabad’s glass workers 10. Professionalism as a soft skill: the social construction of worker identity in India’s new services economy 11. More than language: the work of an English training centre in Delhi Afterword: Skill Acquisition in the Informal Sectors of the South