I find many business people write off academics as anything but alert or willing to learn though that is often quite unfair. Week after week, they interview people doing things on a whole new topic that they may never have thought about before. They have to dig in and think about it and ask questions. While I have the luxury of interviewing fascinating people, they're almost exclusively around similar topics. I m quite envious of people like Terry Gross and some of the others who have to learn about a wonderfully wide array of topics such as film directors or hot air balloon pilots, electronics inventors or historians.
Some professions really are conducive to a particular kind of ongoing learning.
But that s only part of the story. And one way that most people learn in the workplace is through their informal conversations where everybody gets to know each other, livening up their interpersonal experience. I would think that a company that wants people to keep learning in their technical field might encourage and value the fact that they become friends with each other and tell each other stories and that interaction is part of their learning experience. It's through their interactions with each other that new people joining the company are enculturated, which is to say they learn the culture of the company which makes a huge difference as to how it functions. This culture has to keep on being passed on just like any other cultural tradition.