Everyone learns from their experiences. Skills plainly increase, even if slowly, through use. To argue otherwise is ridiculous.
If you are repeatedly exposed to dangerous situations you will learn.
From a game point of view, the characters are already professionals, but there is always room for improvement, albeit slow and slight.
The game option idea of sitting and studying in a RPG doesn't overly excite most players.
Therefore the happy medium is:
(1) If players want to study from books, teacher, so be it, as per rulebook.
(2) If they want to slowly slowly gain from experience, allow it. But make sure the system makes it hard to pick up new skills, unless used in a live situation, and ever harder and harder to improve higher levels of new skills.
Players are happy because, whilst they won't be seeing any news skills for weeks or months , they know that somewhere their little experience point total is ever so slowly increasing.
System currently used is:
Award each player the following after each session
Ingenious use of a skill : 1 point
Good roleplaying: 0-2 points
Overcoming dangerous encounter: 0-1
(not necessarily killing stuff, but also avoiding it)
Mission completion: 1-5
To claim a new skill level, points are spent:
Level Claimed / Points needed
0 / 30
1 / 40
2 / 60
3 / 80
4 / 100
5 / 120
Obviously you need to buy level 1 before you buy 2, so it actually huge numbers needed to climb the levels.
You also need to buy level 0 if you dont have it already first.
Players cannot pick any new unknown level 0 skill unless they can show it was used in a live situation where threat of failure was real.
[No,you can't just sit and should asteroids to gain Gunnery-0, that is more like practical study
Yes ,you could claim it, if you had to man the guns as the gunner was dead, and you tried to hit incoming pirates]
You can't pick JoT either, as it doesn't make sense.
Simply adjust these totals depending on how many sessions you play per week.
