Your concerns about a loss of basic skills is spot on. A few years ago I started a small garden plot. It took me about 3 years to get the soil PH correct and start producing stuff I was able to eat. Mostly peas and tomatoes. I treated it as an experiment, and had fun doing it, but if my survival depended on my ability to grow food, I would have starved. I also don't hunt, so unless I were to team up with a hunter right off the bat to build some basic skills I would starve. Luckily I live in Idaho where guns and hunting are part of the culture. It takes time to build up basic skills though. Canned food will buy us some time as long as that time isn't squandered.

Ish's problem in Earth Abides is that his initial tribe was too small. He was the only curious mind in the tribe and his child who also had an curious mind died young. Nobody was interested in getting the electricity turned back on and it didn't happen. Were his initial tribe larger they would have had a larger group to pool resources and skills together.

In Stephen King's The Stand, the 'good' people gathered in Colorado and the 'bad' gathered in Las Vegas. The gathering allowed both sides to pool resources and get basic services running again. While King's methods of gathering were outlandish, I think the concept is correct. Gathering and pooling resources is crucial.

Some parts of the country are more likely to stabilize than others. The Pacific Northwest has a large hydroelectric infrastructure and a growing wind power infrastructure. Hydro takes a skill set that may be hard to maintain, but even so I think a small community that gathered around a dam might be able to keep the lights on. Even easier would be wind power. We have so many windmills dotting the landscape here that maintaining them and finding parts by canabalizing others should be able to keep the lights on fairly easily. That is of course assuming the community can come up with a way of keeping the generators lubricated as the oil supplies run out or go bad. If the community is large enough and they have a big enough brain pool, they might have a chance.

Another good book is David Brin's The Postman. The part I like least about the book, but is the most telling about the nature of the fledgling communities has to do with the AI. In the book the, the community has an AI which has become almost a deity to the community in that all important questions get asked of the AI and the people have faith in the answers. The protaganist soon discovers its a sham and that the AI died long ago, when he finds the answers getting very general and folksy compared to pre-apocolypse answers. The general theme of the book was it was unnecessary though. What the community needed was to believe they were a part of a larger civilization and that one day everything would be restored. I find that argument intriguing and speaks to the power of optimism and hope.

So I would say having a large enough community of skills, in a location with easily obtained electricity (also food and water), and a sense of hope are the key ingredients to surviving the apocalypse.