Odinsdagrting has been running over a month now. It is just me and my three newbie friends. So far, I've been doing most of the work. It isn't a complaint. My work so far has been an investment. This post, however, is born from an email to my corpmates. I figured this was worth sharing.
Hauling
This can be a corp role onto itself. There are, however, many other roles that can use these same skills.
In this case, though, there are two focuses for one's skills. One I call a container ship, and one is the tramp freighter.
When hauling large amounts of cheap materials, such as minerals and ore, one wants an n-tier industrial, such as the Mammoth or Badger Mk II in the role of a container ship. When fitting these ships, they should be fitted to maximize cargo room. Every low slot should be a cargo expander. Every rig slot should be a cargo expander. The idea is, the ship should carry as many giant containers as possible.
The tramp freighter is for when one is hauling small, more expensive goods, such as salvage, advanced components, or manufactured goods. The tramp freighter needs to be fitted with the intention of reducing time-to-warp. It doesn't need to carry more than one giant container. It needs to slip into warp as quickly as possible. For this reason, it should have initial stabilizers and nano-fibers fit. It may also want to fit warp core stabilizers.
In either of these cases, the ship should have as large and strong a buffer shield tank as possible. High sec, suicide piracy is a very real possibility. These pirates will easily be able to over come any active boosting. A large buffer won't save your ship, but it may keep it intact long enough to get into warp, into the station, through the gate, or until CONCORD arrives.
To see the skills needed for this, just play with ship fittings in EFT or look at ships and modules in EveMon.
Corporate Sales
This is a role that often requires the tramp freighter to quickly carry manufactured goods to the market hubs.
This role also requires the Trade skill. Depending on the volume, this role may also require the Retail and Wholesale skills. It is worth noting that Retail only requires Trade II.
Helpful for this role is also Accounting and Broker Relations. Both of these will reduce costs and save money.
Another skill that would be handy is Daytrading. This skill allows for the remote modification of orders. The Marketing skill will allow one to post remote sell orders, but in most cases, one is delivering the goods to the station and can place the initial order then. Being able to remotely participate in the penny wars is very helpful.
Procurement
Depending on what materials are being procured, this job may require either the container ship or the tramp freighter.
It doesn't require any skills to buy off of existing sell orders. The buyer doesn't pay a tax or broker's fee.
However, it is sometimes cheaper and easier to just place buy orders. In these cases, one will again need to get into the Trade-Retail-Wholesale tree. The Procurement skill replaces the Marketing skill, and is much more handy.
Research Assistant
One of the bottlenecks in Tech 2 production is the limited number of research slots one has available. Some jobs can take days, further slowing the entire process down. It is helpful to have more hands helping with this.
One of the simplest research jobs is copying blueprints. To install a copy job, one simply needs Laboratory Operation which requires Science III.
There are skills, such as Science, that will speed up these jobs. Metallurgy will speed up Material Level research jobs (very useful) and Research will speed up Time Efficiency research jobs (not as useful). However, these types of research jobs only ever need to be done once. Copy jobs have to be done nearly constantly.
Another useful skill is Scientific Networking. This will allow the remote installation of research jobs.
Inventor
To build Tech 2 products (without one of the old Tech 2 blueprint originals) one must invent. The skills required to run an invention job on any given blueprint are listed on the blueprint itself. In this case, it is just a matter of looking into which blueprints you'll want to or be expected to handle.
It is worth noting that the skills to run an invention job are the same skills needed to have a research project with an R&D agent once on has Research Project Management and access to an appropriate R&D agent. The datacores purchased from R&D agents are the same ones needed in the invention process.
Manufacturing
To actually install a standard production job merely requires Industry. There are, however, items that require more skills than this to be built. Those skills, just as the ones for invention, are listed on the blueprint.