Skill is good and educational certificate is also good. Having any of them can actually put food on your table, but the question is which of them will you let go for the other. I mean education can get you a white collar job the same way a skill can too. For me i will let go of the skill because skill without basic education is not good at all. Because I have seen a situation whereby a guy with good skill who got a job was unable to give quotation and he lost the job .Formal education is good for everyone.
For an educational certificate, you have to gain it within a certain time frame. But to develop your skill, you can even gain it when you are already old. That means if you want to obtain an educational certificate, you have to struggle within a certain timeframe. For me, even if I want to gain a certificate, I can't do it because my age doesn't allow me to enrol in the college right now. But I am still developing my skills in various sectors like digital marketing and crypto marketing as well.
We may need basic education, though you don't have a valuable certificate. Nowadays, unless you can read and write properly, especially in English, then it's even hard to develop your skill in any online sector. If you have both certificates and skills, then you can reach a good position in your life. But if you have one of them, you can survive at least, and if you are lucky, you can do something big as well. I don't have really big certificates to do the job. But I have my own business, even if it's small, and it's enough to lead a standard life in my country. So the skill works very well for me.