Where did you work? Maybe it was a good was a good thing. I hope you found a job at a place that believed in investing in its people. I live in the US and my experience has been completely different, and maybe it's unusual.
Every year during budget season my boss is on my ass about the training courses I would like to take so she can secure funding. On top of that our entire department sets up a training seminar once a or twice year that our VP also attends. The Six Sigma Green Belt course was a good 3 days. The others tend to be a management and leadership based, but they have helped me learn speak managerese and schmooze.
There is also an internal online university with web based training with a ton of subjects ranging from software development to creating advertisement. Individual departments will also set up classroom training. For example, our business inelegance department does a week long training on building ETL using Informatica, and another week long training on Oracle Business Intelligence. Departments also do something called a lunch and learn where you bring your lunch and they go over something like the architecture of the billing system.
Outside of the department level training and education there is the $5,000 a year towards a degree at state accredited university. The degree has to be related to your current job. If you quit within a year of completing a course they paid for or get anything below a C, you have to pay the money back. I know a few people that have gotten their MBAs. One guy got his BS in physics.
