WoW Skinning

Skinning is a World of Warcraft profession that allows players to skin beasts for leather and hides. Players must simply train skinning, put a skinning knife in their bag, kill beasts, loot them, and right click them in order to skin to obtain leather and hides. These components can then be used to craft items in other professions like leatherworking, engineering, and tailoring.

Skinning is often trained alongside leatherworking since the majority of components needed for leatherworking are derived from skinning mobs. While other professions like tailoring might require leather for a few recipes this leather is usually easily found in the auction house and it's not necessary to actually train skinning to be able to get it. Skinning is also trained by those looking to make cash by selling the leather in the auction house. Another important note, skinning does not require any other profession to support it, it is a gathering profession and there is no need to buy components, you simply gather the leather off of mobs you kill.

As stated above, skinning and leatherworking are often trained together as characters' two professions. The characters that most commonly train these skills are leather or mail wearers. This is because the gear created through leatherworking is usable by leather and mail wearing classes. 

In order to increase your skill level in skinning you must skin mobs. There is no way around this if you want to increase your skill level. So if the idea of stopping after each kill or every few kills to skin mobs doesn't appeal to you then you are probably better off picking another profession. You must first start skinning lower level mobs and as your skinning skill increases you will then be able to skin higher and higher level mobs...keep this in mind if you plan on training skinning at a high character level, because you will have to go back to lowbie areas to raise you skinning skill level. Also, as you skin higher and higher level mobs you will notice that the leather and hides you receive are of higher value.

Another important note is that you are able to skin mobs killed by players outside of your own group provided that they loot everything off of the mob.

Skinning is most useful to those who have leatherworking trained or are looking to make money by selling leather and hides in the auction house. It is a neat profession that “supports” grinding on mobs...since it is likely that you will have to kill many beasts without any quest directing you to do so!