EVE holds its place in the MMO world as having one of the most unique methods of gaining skills, in that it is entirely time based. So long as you have an active account or active training time on a character and the skills queued up, you will always be training skills. You can tweak and improve the rate at what this skills can be trained at by using implants and attribute re-maps which can make the difference of training of a maximum of 700 skill points (sp) an hour in training, but otherwise you on average train skills at a consistent rate. Even if you didn't play the game. Which is many respects has a huge benefit because those people who don't have the time to grind for XP as you do in other MMO's never feel totally left behind.
Of course this also has its downsides, as the years of the game marched on so did the Skill Point level of its older players and so while they were able to field larger and a more varied range of ships the newer players felt the SP gap more and more as they were, unlike their older counterparts, unable to be as flexible or adaptable to the ever changing EVE meta. Additionally, while there is an undoubted novelty in time based training, it does nothing to help new player retention who look at other players and think - that ship is going to take me two months to get into. And so, the only alternative was to buy a character from the character bizarre if you wanted to launch yourself faster into having a more flexible character.
But buying characters also has a number of pitfalls, it isn't a character you have created and so you may not feel the same level of connection of one that you have crafted from the very beginning. Giving a character a name that you like, an appearance that you like, while planning and plotted the training of that character along the route you wanted to take it is a far more rewarding experience than just buying one. It is also pretty expensive, with a good character costing in excess of many billions of ISK which can equate to a sizeable chunk of real world currency, this only reduces accessibility for newer players.
Enter EVE Player and streamer turned CCP Developer CCP Rise with his blog post 'Exploring The Character Bazaar & Skill Trading' back in October last year as an alternative to buying characters.
In a brief nutshell, the proposed trading would allow players who have already spent time training skills to buy an item from the " target="_blank">New Eden Store (NES) or from the in-game market known as a Skill Extractor. Using this extractor they can then remove Skill Points from a chosen skill or skills and place them into a Skill Injector. They can then trade the injector to another either in person or via the in game market. The purchaser of these skills can use the Injector to add Skill Points to a skill of their choice providing an immediate boost.
For months it was subject to debate and discussion across the eve community. But as people discussed and debated the idea many slowly came round to understanding the benefits of this system. In much the same way as Manic Velocity's video shows.

Fast forward to the 18th of this month and CCP Rise Posted a follow up blog 'Skill Trading in New Eden' fleshing out some more of the details of the skill trading system. The process of how this system works has been brilliantly demonstrated by JonnyPew in his demonstration video which was released when CCP made the skill trading items available on the test server for the first time.

The only unknown at this time is how much the extractors it will cost in Aurum, and ergo real life money. But with the feature going live in just over one week on February 9th the skill training of old is soon to come to an end.