Sure, something like the Sphere Grid from FFX could work just as well. Personally, I don't see a whole lot of difference between the Sphere Grid and the License Board. They're both essentially the same thing.
My idea would be the sphere grid would work to rank up magic. Lets make this simple and say you take up BLM. You start in the middle of the grid and you have 7 branches for your elements (Fire, Water, Thunder, Earth, Wind, Ice, and Dark), you can put poitns in Fire then later on upgrade it to Fire II, etc.

I might try to make a mockup at some point.