Rod:

I had the same experience for many years of the lack of company involvement in furthering your IT skills. One good solution is to take it upon yourself to get this training. The best way I found was to find classes in different facets of my interests and work at local community colleges that were within driving distance. Some of these even allowed me to consistently arrive late for evening classes due to a 60 mile plus commute. I was able to get enough from the classes and following lab sessions to base my own learning and gain the skills I needed. It's obviously not the best, but allows you to progress.

Long ago I did this when wanting to further my skills in IBM's CICS because I had not worked on IBM platforms for years and wanted to know the software. Also when Apple Computer brought the early versions of their Applesoft Basic, my wife and I both attended evening classes at Ivy Tech (Indiana Vocational and Technical College) to learn it together on our early Apple 2 Plus microcomputer. And when the IBM System 3 Model 15 came out, ( I had worked the Model 10 for several yeas ) I again did the evening commute to learn this platform and increase my skills.

Another time I applied for a position that required Fortran development and support which I had never learned. I told the prospective employer that by the time I started the job I would know Fortran. Got the old Microsoft Fortran compiler, and the 'Learn Fortran Now' book, and two weeks later could write passable Fortran code well enough to take on supporting and debugging code created by a very highly skilled consultant to the point I was giving him bug fixes to his code.

Again, when applying for a position that required use of the Ingres database system, I had never seen the software, but took on the challenge and became the one of five developers who did the most development using it.

Even when past 65 years old and still working as a contract DBA, I took a couple community college online classes in HTML and PHP just because I wanted to know what it was all about. It was lots of fun.

You could do it also if you just decide to do it. Otherwise, you can just keep hoping that someone will take you on and train you. But these days that is going to more and more unlikely. If you're lucky, at best you might get a beginner's position - and salary -and still be expected to do it yourself anyway.

Benefit - you get the joy of success for YOURSELF in the deal.