> I've worked for 35ish companies

It seems they were correct not to invest in your skills.

I've worked for six companies over almost 20 years. The majority invested in my skills, and I hope that investment has paid off for them!

What exactly do you have in mind? The large companies I've worked at had book subscriptions, internal training courses, and would pay for school. Personally I don't see the point of any of it. For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free. You can go download e.g. graduate level CS courses on youtube. MIT OCW has been around for almost a quarter century now. IME no one's going to stop you from spending a couple hours a week of work time watching lectures (at least if you're fulltime). Now at least at my company, we have unlimited use of codex, which you can ask for help explaining things to you. I also don't really see how attending conferences relates to skill improvement. Meanwhile, I've been explicitly told by managers that spending half my time mentoring people sounds reasonable.

I can't understand what people are looking for when they talk about lack of investment into training for engineers. It's not the kind of job where someone can train you. It's like an executive complaining they aren't trained. You're the one who's supposed to be coming up with answers and making decisions. You need to spend time on self-motivated learning/discovering how to better do your work. Every company I've been at big or small assumes that's part of the job.

What is your expectation, exactly?

In US you go to college for 4-5 years and pay $50k per year. Or more.

You pay to learn. A lot of money, a lot of time.

Then you get a job, where the idea is that you get paid for doing work and you expect the employer to do what?

You seem to expect that not only you won't be doing the things you're being paid to do but the employer will pay for your education on company's time.

How many weeks per year of time off do you expect to get from a company?

You'll either say a reasonable number, like 1 or 2, which is insignificant to the time you supposedly spent learnings (5 years). You just spend 250 weeks supposedly learning but 1 or 2 weeks a year is supposed to make a difference?

Or you'll say unreasonable number (anything above 2 weeks) because employment is not free education.

Care to explain a bit more?

With 35 companies, that would be around 1-2 years per company on average if you are retired or near retirement. I doubt any company is seriously investing in a worker who would likely be gone the next year. Getting lip service seems already good deal at that point.

These two statements go hand in hand though. While I do believe companies could take the altruistic take of training people whether or not they stay, and some places do, they're certainly not going to make the effort for someone who has clear markers of being someone who will leave anyway.

This percentage is probably right on the money!

Hard same over 20 years