I have a slightly different problem. My employer will pay to help us keep our skills up. We can take training classes and go to 1 related conference per year. W

I have a slightly different problem. My employer will pay to help us keep our skills up. We can take training classes and go to 1 related conference per year. We have some time during regular development to work on innovative projects that we'd like to implement or experiment with. That's all great, but much of it ends up not being applicable. For example, we were trained in a new language about 3 years ago, but we haven't been allowed to use it in our product yet! I've been doing my home projects in it, so I'm ready to go when we do start using it. But most of my coworkers took the class and haven't touched it since. They've likely forgotten everything about it. Likewise, the conferences are nice, but I've never implemented anything useful after having read a paper about it, or seen a presentation on it. (The few times I've tried, it turned out the paper didn't give enough information to do your own implementation!) It does keep me aware of what's going on in the field, but I'm not sure how useful it actually is to my job.