However I have also lived in Vancouver BC, Truro, Nova Scotia, St. John's, Newfoundland, Santa Cruz, California and Silicon Valley.
The claim that there was a tech worker shortage started to appear during the dot-com boom, but never really went away, even when the economy contracted during the dot-com crash and later, the subprime meltdown.
I have worked for a few companies that were happy to train. That typically happened when engineers who were experienced with the technology were not to be found at all. For example I was taught Python by a shop that was all-Python, quite a long time before it became popular. I was also taught Smalltalk at another shop, but that came after Smalltalk had declined in popularity.
In both cases the expense of the training was really quite minimal: I was given my regular pay to read a book, then write some practice code, for about a week, after which I was able to code productively, then was as productive as the rest of the staff after a month or so.