I agree and my company does the only two things in support of my learning goals that I could expect. They will let me work on a project using technology that they know I’m not the most experienced with to give me the chance to learn it instead of siloing me on just my area expertise and they reimburse me for AWS certifications. Both of which at the end of the day help them out.
I wouldn’t expect them to let me spend time on the clock to learn Haskell or Rust when we are a C#/JavaScript/Python shop or to learn the ins and outs of Azure since we are an AWS shop.
Faire enough, on my case I am free to spend the time on any technology, provided it is agreed upon and I happen to do an session to the team afterwards.
So lets not generalize if it is a waste of time to the OP to learn Scala.
I wouldn’t expect them to let me spend time on the clock to learn Haskell or Rust when we are a C#/JavaScript/Python shop or to learn the ins and outs of Azure since we are an AWS shop.