alt Hacker News> For software engineering, the info you need is all online for free.
Guided learning with instant feedback can be much more efficient than just consuming and tinkering on your own. Depends on the topic, the teacher and situation of course. The quality of available material is also all over the place, and not every topic has enough material, or anything at all.
For foundational knowledge, there's been high quality information for free from MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, etc. out there for years. Just look there first. If you're beyond that, you're beyond the canon that you can "learn" and closer to needing to follow/participate in SOTA R&D. And if you need a more structured environment, that's why people go to school. Engineering jobs expect you're at the level of someone who's completed undergrad, minimum. Part of an undergrad degree is getting used to seeking out resources yourself and learning from them instead of having a teacher spoon-feed it.
Again I just don't have any idea of what training people expect. The entire job is basically "we might have some idea of what we want to do, but no one here knows the details. Go figure it out."
What kind of guided learning would you want? How to solve problems? That's what 16 years of school was for!