Is the conference and/or the schedule of talks directly relevant to my job responsibilities or am I going because my employer wants me to be there to learn some

Is the conference and/or the schedule of talks directly relevant to my job responsibilities or am I going because my employer wants me to be there to learn something specific or doe a bit of passive recruiting? In that case employer pays. Do I just want to go to a particular conference and my employer doesn't particularly care about the conference or I can't make a convincing case for a specific business interest that this conference serves? No, the employer does not pay. Next time make sure that you add attendance at a conference that seems somewhat relevant into your employment contract. I have found that this is one of the better times to make the ask (e.g. "I want to make sure I am on top of my game and delivering best practices and new techniques to the company, so I think we should add PyCon attendance to the list of benefits/duties and I will also do a bit of recruiting there for the company...") As far as what refusal means, it could either be that the department just doesn't have spare discretionary budget to fly you somewhere to sit in a hotel for a week or else they have the budget but just have no interest in sending you because they do not think it would be worth it. For the latter you can plan ahead a bit more and spend 4-6 months reminding the decision maker about some interesting talk at conference X and how it might apply to some activity the company cares about.