The skill system hasn’t been added yet, just a first pass at leveling up and experience and whatnot. Check out the link in the first sentence to see what cool stuff is ahead.
I agree with this a lot and it’s one of my main fears for this game. I love progression but if progression is just mindlessly mining to get skill points that don’t really serve any purpose it’s going to be a bummer. Creature combat and difficulty needs to be worked on and a wide difficult gap between newb and end-game planets needs to exist.