My boss does not encourage learning new technologies and cares only about deliverables and deadlines. They do not provide any extra learning time, but they do reward when we go and do something better. They say, "if you want to contribute to new things, do your regular work and extend your time in office."
Is it reasonable to ask employees to extend their time in office to learn new things?
My IT corporation considers learning new things as crucial part of their competitiveness. So out of 8 hours of daily working time, we are expected to work 7 hours on projects and have 1 hour for other activities, especially
Employees determine what they want to learn by themselves, but of these things, some are always consulted with the manager and officially recorded as commitment to individual's career development path, which is tracked and evaluated.
We are also encouraged to hold one hour per week as meeting for the whole team (where presence is expected, but not mandatory) on teaching others new things we learned.
So in the summary, 5 out of 40 weekly hours are available and paid for this. If I don't have time to follow this for longer period (project work is going 40 hrs/week), I am raising this with my boss as an alert, because development goals are going to be missed.
You can check with your manager and maybe give them the above as counterexample how some companies in industry do this. It is in company's own interest to provide time for learning.
Your manager's reaction is one of results of the test whether your employer is worth you, because if you imagine staying there and losing the opportunities (when compared to other possible jobs in the industry which you could work at) it can be a deal-breaker. Of course, alternatively you can try a 'partisanship', learning things on your own, gaining advantage against your colleagues who are not. Maybe this can accelerate your career in your current company, maybe not (if they are not valuing these skills enough). Anyhow, sooner or later you will see whether to stay or go.
(In my opinion) To better yourself you will need to learn new things, be it for your current job, or the next. So you will either do that in the office (outside of work hours) or out of the office.
If you can be seen to be putting in the time "in the office" then that may influence next review time. If two people are being put forward for a promotion, and one spends an extra hour every day in the office bettering themselves, then that person is more valuable to the company.
It is unfortunate when your manager is not at all a leader, but it seems like that is the case. Developing competence is a crucial part of high performance deliveries, both in present and future. If employees are not learning, they are gradually becoming worse than the average competitors employees. Bad for motivation, bad for business - Hard to see as a part of a successful strategy working for an "industrialized world" company. (However, if your wage is lower than average world wage, tough luck...)
To your point, it is not reasonable to ask it - but it is certainly reasonable to do it in any case (spend time, possibly your own, on learning new things). To my eye, a boss that doesn't care about competence more than randomly rewarding it is not doing very well at his position...
It's reasonable for an employer to push you to be better without going overboard. Learn as much as you can on the job and consider learning new skills that are relevant to your industry.
