CCP Eris Discordia has announced in a dev blog today that they're developing a skills queue so you'll have the opportunity to advance your character while you're offline. According to the dev, the system does not contain the risk of players queueing forever and being inactive in the game.

The skill training system we came up with allows you to queue skills that will start training in the next 24 hours. You can enter in up to 50 skills in a queue, as long as they all start training within 24 hours. This leaves room to start a skill that will take 6 hours, followed with one that takes 12 to complete. With only 18 hours of training prepared, the queue still has room to start another skill.

 If you train a skill the old fashioned way (by activating a skill as you do now without the queue window) it will still be listed in the queue as the top skill; the skill you are training now. If you don´t add a follow-up skill then you´d have to come back when that skill is finished. You can still start training skills from your normal character sheet without entering the queue.

You can read the full blog entry here. CCP Eris Discordia has also asked for feedback on how you manage skills.