It's also a given that many IT professionals are not given the time, space or resources they need to do this at work, so they end up doing it in their "spare time", to the detriment of other things they might otherwise like to be doing. Others are given this at work, but at a low priority, or in a half-hearted way where you have 8 hours of work a day you're expected to get done every day - sure you can spend some time learning, but you still need to deliver that 8 hours of what the business considers "work"!
So it makes sense that no matter what we do, we ought to maximise the ROI on our "learning time"!