Skill Discussions

I can only answer from the small amount of time i have been playing, and that as a miner. that there is nothing 'wrong' with trying to skill in everything but it is the time frame to do it.
I had spent months getting mining to a level that i found i was happy with and now i am looking to get into missions and now looking at another few months just to get the basics covered.

There are so many skills that are used no matter what you are doing and these should be the ones you skill first while you work where you want to start off. And here is some advice, getting into a ship to fly it is the easy part. skilling to fly it to it's fullest is the long part.
cheers

The problem is that the time cost for skill levels ramps up something quite fierce as you go for the higher levels. If you specialise, you can be really really good at something in a surprisingly short amount of time, in spite of EVE's reputation for taking forever to get anywhere, but the last stretch will take a little while. If you want the same level of competence in multiple things, however, it will basically take forever, and the difference will not be as big as you might imagine.

The general rule of thumb is that, anything that is worth training is worth training to IV — lvl V is for unlocking new skills or bits of equipment (most notably a all the T2 ships and also some modules) and for really specialising in a particular area.

The difference between the two is that lvl V takes more than five times as long to learn as lvl IV. In other words, in the time it takes you to get that last tiny bonus from lvl V, you can take five different skills to IV. When you then go and look at what you actually get for that training time, you quickly see why specialising in just a few lvl V skills makes sense:

Say that you want to take a weapon skill to lvl V because the skill gives you a 5% bonus to damage per level, and you always want more damage, right…? Well, yes and no, because there are more than one way to skin that particular cat. The problem is that going from IV to V actually means that you're going from a 20% bonus to a 25% bonus — an increase of only 4% — and that in the same time, you could instead work on all the support skills for that weapon, bringing them all up to lvl IV and get something along the lines of five other 20% bonuses. In total, that would give you nearly 150% bonuses by training all those other skills to a moderate level, compared to the measly 4% you get out of lvl V.

It's this trade-off that makes you want to keep your maxed-out skills to a minimum, or at least focused on some very important task, early on. Sure, in the future, you might have some use for those last levels as well, but in the future, you will also have time to spend on training them: when you already have all the lvl IVs you need, you can start to top them off where the need is the greatest. As a point of reference, taking all skills to lvl V takes somewhere around 19 years(!); taking all skills to lvl IV (which requires some skills to be at lvl V since they act as prerequisites for other skills, so it won't be the expected 1:5 ratio) is doable in maybe 5-6 years. That is the cost of “specialising in everything.”

Of course, as always, there are exceptions. Some skills are so cheap and so universally useful that there's literally no excuse for leaving them at IV (the basic ship fitting and stats skills such as Electronics, Engineering, Mechanic and so on fall into this category), but even then, that last level is something you should get at, maybe 3–6 months age — during your first couple of months, there are still better uses of your time. There are also a couple of skills that give you such obscenely good bonuses and which make such a huge difference that they are more than worth the extra training time (Logistics, Drone Interfacing and Recon being common examples).

Also, a lot of this is naturally down to how you define “good”. Lvl IV definitely qualifies as “good”, and if you want to be good in many areas, taking anything and everything to lvl IV is certainly doable, and will get you a very proficient jack of all trades. Lvl V, on the other hand, is not just good, but the best, and that's basically the measure of specialisation. Those are the two goals you have to choose and balance between.
Because SP comes at a cost, and because more characters lets you do more things at a time. If you build a combat character, it will sooner or later (and with some frequency) get podded and require a clone renewal — if you've crammed all of your skills into that character, the cost of that clone will start to ramp up.

If you instead offload some skills on a different character that won't get podded all the time, you've save yourself a nice chunk of change every time you die.

The separation is fairly obvious if you have, say, a combat character and an industry/trader character — since the skill overlap between those roles is pretty insignificant — but it even holds true if you have a PvP-combat and a PvE-combat character. The latter will not need to full range of skills that the former does due to how PvE fits and strategies differ from PvP fits and strategies. Also, you can (and will want to) load the two up with completely different implant sets, which again leads to different way of approaching the inevitable clone loss of the PvP character: you can probably afford to plug far more expensive stuff into your PvE character than you'll want to have in your PvP char, simply due to the replacement cost and frequency. So even if the two will superficially be rather similar in their build and skill set, the differences in how you use them and in the applicability of the skills will make it a fairly sensible option to have them as two separate characters.

Also keep in mind that you have two other chars on your account.
While they might seem rather useless for a beginner, eventually you will see the use of them, especially if they are specialized in a certain field, further taking away training time from your main.

One common use for those extra characters is trading. People will train up trading skills to a high level (there aren't many, it only take a few weeks) and then go back to training their main while using the alts to make money by trading or prducing PI or some such.

My strategy is:
* Train skills to level 2 to start. It is fast and offers a decent benefit.
* Train skills for stuff I use more often to level 3.
* Train skills for stuff I use all the time to level 4.
* Train skills for stuff that is incredibly important to me and that I can't imagine being without, to level 5.

I currently have a research character training Caldari Freighter 5. With a int > mem attribute mapping, that will take about 45 days. Why is that character spending a month and a half on the small benefit from one skill? Because that character pretty much lives in a Charon freighter, and so often being able to carry just a little bit more would have avoided making two trips. As it is a research character, it really wouldn't be useful to remap attributes for that time either.

I also can pilot a Charon freighter. In fact, most of my characters can. However, I only have Caldari Freighter 4, and have no real plans to ever train it higher. Getting 80% of benefit is good enough for me. I am currently training Minmatar Battleship 4, and will probably train Ammar after that (I'm primarily a Caldari pilot, and have Caldari Battleship 5).

The hardest part of skill training is prioritizing, and those priorities can change.