If you’ve chosen to further explore mining, you’ll want to train these skills:
Mining Frigate
Level IV - as an alpha clone, the best ship available to you
for mining is the Venture. Training up this skill will improve the Venture’s
mining bonuses.
Mining
Level IV adds a little more yield to your mining lasers, so each cycle
will obtain a bit more ore.
Mining Upgrades
Level IV lets you use a Mining Laser Upgrade II which provides
the best bonus to mining lasers available in a module. (Even just Level I will
let you use the basic version of the module for a smaller bonus.)
If you want, you can also explore gas harvesting, which is very similar to ore
mining but is done at special gas sites which have to be scanned down with probes. If you want to harvest gas, train Gas Cloud Harvesting
Level II and equip your
Venture with a pair of gas harvesters instead of mining lasers.
The skill book for Gas Harvesting is somewhat expensive, and the gas harvesters themselves are also a little spendy. However, the gas mined with them will often fetch a higher price than ore would.
Most of the valuable gas sites occur in dangerous areas - lowsec and wormhole space.