To put it simply: take a relevant book home and read it. If your company has a library of useful books, see if you can check one out and take it off premises to read at home. If it doesn't, search online, ask for suggestions (such as on these forums), buy the book yourself and read it on your own time. Technical books may cost a couple hundred dollars, but even just one or two sentences in them could save your company tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. At our company, we have a large, growing library and expect engineers to self-educate. I also have a personal technical library that's cost thousands of my own dollars that complements what we don't have at work. My boss is usually happy to buy any book if an employee suggests it may be useful, because the cost of the book or many books is usually dwarfed by the savings of what's learned in them. Sometimes, I'll buy the books myself if I don't feel like sharing all my hard-earned and paid-for knowledge with everyone else in the company before I've gotten legitimate recognition for going the extra mile. Of course, there's also a massive amount of information online, and I'd suggest getting a Dropbox or other similar service and dumping everything you can into topical folders in that. By doing that, I can bring up useful articles and other info on my computer, phone, and iPad wherever I want. The more information you can find, the more information you'll have to parse down to a coherent model of what you need to do.
I look at self-study as waaaaay more effective and cost-efficient than higher education. Classes are much more expensive and less pinpointed than the books you might buy, so consider that when you balk at the price of a $200-300 book. Plus, books designed for practical work situations are way more informative than books designed for the classroom. In a few weeks or months of reading the right book, supplemented with your own research from the internet and other sources, you could know more practical, directly-useful information about a subject than an entire course of graduate study. Traditional engineering schools just aren't geared to be efficient and practical in what teach when it comes to using that knowledge directly in a real-world job. One exception to this rule, I think, is a decent or good community college. Their classes are affordable, frequently offered at night so they don't conflict with work, and often address very specific skillsets that are much more directly applicable to actual work. I've taken a welding class at night at a nearby one that was very helpful when it came time for me to manage our ASME U-Stamp renewal. I'm a chemical engineer, so this isn't in my supposed realm, but it was necessary, and the class helped quite a bit. I've seen plenty of other classes that range from instrumentation and PLC-programming classes to all varieties of HVAC classes to drafting with various programs and much more. That's the more nuts and bolts type of training that most engineers desperately need. Also, any organization that values the letters after your name more than the actual skills you have has major problems in how it thinks and is going to always under-utilize you.
Look at your self-training as an INVESTMENT in your future that will pay off dividends in the form of higher salary, higher position, bonuses, or the ability to take what you've learned and start your own business. Don't get stuck in this expectation that your company owes you everything for your own improvement. If they clearly expect you to do a certain task the way they want it, then they should obviously train you in their ways. But if you want to go beyond that, you can have total control over where you go if you want. And if you don't, I hope the rest of your colleagues are the same way, because the ones that take things a step farther of their own volition will end up being your boss.
