You must've chose some profession tutorial like "Exploration" or something. It was a while ago when I did the tutorial, but I think I did industry and it was easy enough to make stuff and sell and mining was really simple...but boring as hell...which I did mostly AFK.

And I also ventured into missions to do some fighting, which was hard...until someone helped me with some tips.
Anyways, to answer your question, I actually didn't do any of that scanning stuff until way later when I quit and came back to the game to play a little bit for some "expansion" if I remeber. But it was really weird at first, but there's a youtube tutorial that prolly describes it better than in-game stuff. I didn't know what I was doing either and brought some ppl into a wormhole some dude had coordinates for and we couldn't get out because I didn't have the right scanning items. LOL That is...until some dude who lived in the wormhole scanned US down and tried to kill us, but then felt sorry for us because we were such noobs and gave us some good probes and website on how to use them. So then I fine my first exit wormhole in about an hour or two...but it's to deep Russian territory (who were ruthless). And I was trying find a safer wormhole for a while, but then my friends got frustrated and decided to exit the wormhole. Well, they got blow up trying to get back...but that was one of the funnest sessions I had.

I mean, now I can find most things in a couple of minutes but it took some practice. And you need to use the shift and alt keys to make it easier.
But so, nah...you don't really need to explore in the beginning unless you really want that profession. But if you want to find the most expensive items later, you will need to find (or have a teammate find) these spawn bases which have escalating fights to a boss. And if you want to go into wormholes, you need it too, unless you're with someone who has it...and doesn't get killed. You also need to be real good at it if you're into scouting out other ppl to try to kill them. Unless you're freind does that role once again. But one popular thing some noobs do is scan down dead unlooted mobs that questers leave behind ( I think it has a hour or something) and make some easy money. In populated solar systems, you might get "free loot" where some ppl don't bother looting or do this thing called "salvaging" where you use an item to extract craft mats from destroyed ships. And this can be loot from more valuable ships that you would not be able to kill yet.