Gaining different colours of experience - component question

what does gaining experience, or leveling up, in an element do?

im guessing it represents profeciency and you get to use stronger skills in that element, but how does the player use their skills? if the skill is shown by card then you will just have to change how players attain their skills

another unknown is outside of exp, does your game have other resources the player needs to manage? like is there mana? cause if you have mana, leveling up may mean increasing your maximum mana. they will still have to charge up that mana bar before using their skills, but with a bigger reserve, they can use bigger skills

and for a neutral "element", sounds to me it should be able to use any element to supplement its use than have its own "element" to manage

sorry if my questioning sounds probing, but its to provide a suggestion that is relevant to your needs

I have one game, where I use wooden cubes in different colours to represent "experience" of different sorts. Gaining these cubes adds nice feel to the game. The cubes are used to buy different kind of advancements for Player characters, which keeps their quantity in check. Thereby this method would probably get cluttered, if you need simply to keep track of cumulative experience.