In my experience, there is never enough time to complete the existing projects comfortably before the deadline. (If there is enough time, it means some team member should be moved to another project, or a new project should be created. Otherwise the managers are not doing their job.) So the actual problem with employee training is usually time, not money.
If you could learn a new work-related skill in literally zero time, most companies would be happy to pay the expenses. It wouldn't be different from buying a new chair, or a larger monitor. But if learning the skill takes a few days (forget about weeks!), in short term it means that a project that is already late would become even more late. Which is why the company totes supports investing in their human resources, but sorry, you can't get the training right now, because there are higher priorities. (Spoiler: there will always be higher priorities.)
Which is sad, because in many cases what is needed is time, not extra money. There are free tutorials, free online courses; the employees have skills they could teach their colleagues. In theory, the company totes supports employees with initiative to offer internal trainings, until they realize that this actually requires some time, too. Then you get the usual "yes, but not anytime soon". (Translation: it means "no".)
I have also seen it from the other side. At some point of my life, I was providing courses for companies.
Generally, there are companies willing to pay you for lessons of MS Word, or MS Excel. (Also Photoshop etc., but I wasn't doing those.) But with anything more complicated, time became an issue. Like, there would be a market for e.g. Enterprise Java lessons, assuming you could teach the whole thing from scratch in one day. Two days, maybe. But three days is definitely too long.
Literally, I once had a potential client asking me whether I could teach their new employees, who had zero programming skills (in any programming language, ever), make Java Enterprise applications. They gave me the checklist with dozen required topics, like web services etc. How quickly can I get my students from zero to expert? I thought about it, and concluded that perhaps in one week, I could at least tell them something about each topic; with no hope that they would remember it all, but perhaps if I also gave them detailed written notes, they would be able to reconstruct parts of it later. When I made a schedule and showed it to the potential client, they were horrified why should it take so much time; there were expecting at most three days, preferably two. At that moment I understood how much the complexity of technical knowledge is underestimated by those who make the decisions.
tl;dr - you are supposed to learn in your free time (and sometimes the company is willing to pay for it)
Yeah that's my experience too, which is why I asked. As you say, sending a secretary to an 'advanced Excel' course is common enough, but for real tech topics, there isn't anything you can really teach in a few days that you can't learn yourself from a book and some websites in the same time. And getting some budget for going to a conference a few isn't usually too hard, but it's still completely self-directed learning.
I'm not complaining, I was just wondering what is 'normal'.
If you could learn a new work-related skill in literally zero time, most companies would be happy to pay the expenses. It wouldn't be different from buying a new chair, or a larger monitor. But if learning the skill takes a few days (forget about weeks!), in short term it means that a project that is already late would become even more late. Which is why the company totes supports investing in their human resources, but sorry, you can't get the training right now, because there are higher priorities. (Spoiler: there will always be higher priorities.)
Which is sad, because in many cases what is needed is time, not extra money. There are free tutorials, free online courses; the employees have skills they could teach their colleagues. In theory, the company totes supports employees with initiative to offer internal trainings, until they realize that this actually requires some time, too. Then you get the usual "yes, but not anytime soon". (Translation: it means "no".)
I have also seen it from the other side. At some point of my life, I was providing courses for companies.
Generally, there are companies willing to pay you for lessons of MS Word, or MS Excel. (Also Photoshop etc., but I wasn't doing those.) But with anything more complicated, time became an issue. Like, there would be a market for e.g. Enterprise Java lessons, assuming you could teach the whole thing from scratch in one day. Two days, maybe. But three days is definitely too long.
Literally, I once had a potential client asking me whether I could teach their new employees, who had zero programming skills (in any programming language, ever), make Java Enterprise applications. They gave me the checklist with dozen required topics, like web services etc. How quickly can I get my students from zero to expert? I thought about it, and concluded that perhaps in one week, I could at least tell them something about each topic; with no hope that they would remember it all, but perhaps if I also gave them detailed written notes, they would be able to reconstruct parts of it later. When I made a schedule and showed it to the potential client, they were horrified why should it take so much time; there were expecting at most three days, preferably two. At that moment I understood how much the complexity of technical knowledge is underestimated by those who make the decisions.
tl;dr - you are supposed to learn in your free time (and sometimes the company is willing to pay for it)