> To take the initial premise of this and go in a different direction, maybe the problem isn't "Why aren't people improving themselves outside of work hours?" b

> To take the initial premise of this and go in a different direction, maybe the problem isn't "Why aren't people improving themselves outside of work hours?" but instead "How do we help people do 'professional development' within work hours?" You don't want to go down this path. Companies don't want to spend $LARGE on employee training just to see employees walk right out the door and leverage that training into a higher salary from a competitor which doesn't have to train them. There's an argument to be made that employees should therefore be paid more when they finish their training, but such pay increases are usually pre-determined at a fixed rate by policy and aren't in tune with the market value of the new skills, and employers with such a policy will more often than not end up either over- or under-paying for new training. Where pay increases are not determined by a fixed-rate, the decision by how much to raise pay typically rests on an individual, who will exhibit bias in some fashion, and when the decision is made by committee, the result is either political infighting or corruption or both. The historical solution was non-compete clauses in employment contracts, so that new employees could be trained without fear of them going to a competitor. Like I said, you don't want to go down that path.