During character creation, if you choose the survivor skill path for at least one of your main characters, you will start off with the survivor thieving skills available to level 5. For example, you could put up to 5 skill points into Poison, Weapon Damage. Learning these skills from Tax will raise that maximum level to 10, but does not otherwise help; you still need to invest your own skill points to improve your existing skills or create new ones.
You will next meet Tax near the beginning of act 2, so if you don't think you will need to put more than 5 skill points into one of these skills during act 1, you can put off learning them until later, if you wish.
