Absolutely you get out what you put in. My company has thousands of programmers. I was in charge of helping a group of programmers self learn a new framework/language. It started off with 30. It ended up with me alone in a room. This was easily 3k worth of free classes. It was not even that hard you just had to watch some videos and maybe do some simple coding, maybe 1-2 hours a week, 9 sessions over 3 months. Most just did not do it, which means they would not show up to the sessions. By the last 2 sessions I just did not bother to try to get them to come. There were 3 I could kind of coach along and get them to sometimes engage. But mostly they just were not interested in helping themselves. They wanted me to sit in front of the 'class' and teach it. Now that I think about it this could be a good way to filter for people who are motivated to do work. But it would bias against people who have a full schedule.