At my company, every team manager has a "learning and development" budget but they never think about it, so if you have some conference you want to go to, educational course, book, etc, all you have to do is convince them it's at least tangentially related to your work and you get it covered out of that budget, which is usually full.

I actually prefer this arrangement over top-down employee training since it means I have more control over what I spend my time learning.