This is probably not the best time to discuss personnel development, given the current economic conditions, but then again, maybe it is.
How much does your company budget for training?
I was very fortunate when I was with Advanstar Communications for the last five years because my boss, Rich McCourt, believed strongly in training, both technical and soft skills. It was largely because of that that I got involved in PASS, my local SQL Server users group, blogging here, etc. Each year we were all expected to take two weeks of training, and some times I even had more than that.
Having, and using, a training budget accomplishes at least two things for employees - it gives them technical (or non-technical, in the case of soft skills) knowledge that they can use to make the systems they work on better, or improve their relationship with their user communities. It also tells them that they are valued employees and that their personal improvement is as much a priority to the company as the bottom line is. This value generally is returned back to the company at a far higher return than the cost of the training given.
Many companies send their people to classes just when they need to take on a new technology and come up to speed quickly. This is good, but sending people to classes when things aren't changing can help them get a broader perspective on the technology and maybe introduce some new ideas to make the technology work better.
There are a lot of sources for training, as many companies offer classes on specific technologies, some from Microsoft Learning and many others developed by experts in-house. Local colleges offer a wide array of courses that cover specific technical areas.
What I found most value in was technical conferences, like Tech Ed, and most appropriately, PASS. The wide variety of subjects covered, combined with the opportunity to network with others who did the same kind of work I did (since I was the only SQL Server DBA in my shop) proved invaluable.
Budgets are tight, that's a given, but investing a small amount in training can reap benefits significantly greater than the cost of that training.
Allen