I agree with most of Ribbons' advice, gbaker. My own approach, throughout my life, when I haven't been able to get my employers to pay for a class (and how often does that happen? Good training is expensive, after all), has been to steal slices of time here and there, teaching myself incrementally. So this week I have a new task to perform, and my boss says "now, Bob, I know you like to automate things, but this time we haven't got time for you to write a program; just do it". ("Tom", I complained more than once, "you like me to know all this stuff but you never want me to learn it." He laughed and acknowledged the justice of my accusation—but nevertheless, this time I should just do it.) So increasingly I ignored that directive and spent some time learning something new anyway. If I thought I'd need a day to do something the hard way, but I suspected I could do it quicker if I learned a new tool, then I took an hour or two to get started on that tool. Then, if necessary, I went back to the hard way; but by then I had an hour or two's worth of new information that would make the task go that much faster the next time.

The result now is that I can do things faster and more reliably in several languages and platforms, making me much more valuable to the boss who didn't want to spare the time. So will you, if you keep at it.

I agree with Ribbons; you'll spend all your life learning more (if you don't balk at it), but a month of this sort of self-training will give you a tremendous improvement in your abilities. I don't think a day with a guru will equal it; a guru is nice to have on call, but in my experience he can only give you those critical hints now and then, while the real learning happens while you're struggling and sweating over a difficult problem.