I've been paid to learn off and on throughout my career a number of times. The first time that comes to mind was in 1996, when I was effectively just building custom computers for small businesses. I was working for a small firm and then I'd gone solo because that firm went out of business due to their own dysfunction. I was working with one of the clients, setting up their computers that they had just purchased from me, and they asked, "Can you set up our internet?" I said, "What do you mean, set up your internet?" We got this Hughes network satellite dish coming in and we need to put it up on the roof of this four-story building and run cable down to our routers and lan configuration in the basement. We don't know anything about how to do that so I said, "Sure, I got you." I took that dish home with me and set it up in my front yard at my small two-bedroom house and spent the weekend figuring out how to make that thing work. Then the next week I showed up and set it up on the roof and ran a cable down to their network and done, having never touched a satellite dish or incoming internet like that. It was an entirely new experience. It's was an hourly rate. I could have charged a lot more but I think it was only like $500. The point is that weekend was charged with a ton of education: a firehose flood of understanding how satellite internet works (in the 90's, mind you) and how to properly configure it into their networking.