The phrase 'skilled amateur' is correct and usable in written English.
You could use it to describe someone who has a level of skill in a particular activity, but who is not professionally or officially trained. For example, "The chess tournament was won by a skilled amateur who had only been playing for a few months."
Mr. Deskey was a skilled amateur photographer and electronics wizard and a punster.
Membership is not limited to novices; skilled amateur racers are expected to join as well.
(5) Judge Hardy's son Samuel, who died in 1933, at the age of eighty-five, waskilledlled amateur violinist.
Most of the paintings are 18th and 19th century works, many of them by skilled amateur English artists.
A skilled amateur mechanic might be able to recreate a classic using a new body for $20,000.
The program opened with a poised, spirited account of Mozart's Flute Quartet in D (K. 285), music fashioned for a skilled amateur but amenable to professionals.
Rather, like Carlo Weisz, the hero of "The Foreign Correspondent", they are skilled amateurs.
Web-gaming services such as Microsoft's Xbox Live or Blizzard's Battle.net offer skilled amateurs a chance to play against professionals, which would be unthinkable in, say, professional football or basketball.
That structure, or rather, lack of structure has not been arrived at by design but reflects the organic emergence of the scientific enterprise over the past several hundred years from the work of skilled amateurs and groups of scholars with university and courtly affiliations.
Skilled amateurs and professional interpreters go on the platform and earn money for their time.
Skilled amateurs can maintain a foreign currency account at a U.S. broker and use that to trade on an overseas exchange.
