You never know what the future will hold so I think it pays to be diligent in advancing your own skills even if you can't put them into practice at your place of work. At my last job I constantly checked out new software and tools that I thought were interesting without the company paying for training. I would spend time on the weekends when the weather was bad or sometimes late at night trying out new tools and trying to further my existing skill sets even though I knew the company would not adopt many of them. This helped me immensely when I switched jobs and found my new company used many of the tools that I had been tinkering with on my own dime.