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I think it depends on what kind of curation you are doing.
If you are curating a single tag or subject area, say fiction or black-and-white photography, then the key skills are knowledge and expertise of the subject area and perhaps an eye for detail. It would probably help if you have some abilities in the particular area yourself, although it's not a necessity. There are great editors and agents who aren't writers, for example.
If you are trying to curate from the Steem blockchain as a whole, perhaps for one of the curation teams, then I think the key skills are (a) IT skills, since you really need some kind of automated system to pull out potential candidate posts and cut down the volume of posts to look through and (b) the ability to process volumes of information quickly. Otherwise you simply won't get through all the posts.
If you are curating purely to gain the most rewards then you simply need to know how the maths of the system works and where large upvotes are likely to arise. But that's probably a separate question altogether!
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