Education benefits?
Many large companies have education benefits.
The catch is, you often have to walk up to your boss and ask to be sent to class, or a workshop, or whatever. Sometimes you even have to write half a page justifying how the company would benefit from you having an improved skill.
This is called "initiative."
What I would guess is that there's a vast tonnage of people at IBM who are lacking in this thing. This is probably a remediation effort to make up for a presumption that having that word on a resume meant the employee had the attribute.
Those who have been keeping up-to-date feel screwed by shouldering the extra work, but I'd wager they've been being screwed by their skillless coworkers for some time now. It's now simply more obvious.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
