Last weekend I took an Adobe InDesign course at BAVC and was surrounded by Sales & Marketing start-up folks taking classes so they didn’t have to bother their busy design and engineering teams with small requests. I had to restrain myself from recruiting every single one of them (especially the one who brought donuts in the morning).

Becoming armed and dangerous in Silicon Valley is easier than most people realize. There are amazing tech classes in the Bay Area that don’t require technical degrees or taking a sabbatical – they are just a little hard to find:

1. BAVC – offers an exhaustive selection of video production courses as well as Adobe, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, color, and typography workshops. If you’re a start-up, you might even qualify to take classes for free.
2. TechShop – offers electronics, machining, and other workshop classes. Right now, Autodesk provides Autodesk Inventor workshops for free (for members). Or prototype that electric gizmo you’ve been dreaming about with the Arduino series. The TechShop’s laser cutting and etching course is far and away their most popular course. The TechShop also has three locations in San Francisco, Menlo Park, and Mountain View.
3. Stanford Continuing Studies – offers nearly everything from language development, liberal arts courses, writing workshops, lecture series, to professional development. The Personal & Professional Development Series offers financing, leadership, PHP, entrepreneurial, public speaking, and Web design courses. I took a public speaking course with Matt Abrahams. The writing workshops are also highly regarded. It’s also worth mentioning that many of the Art and Archaeology instructors offer international trips to excavate or study art in-person.
4. UC Berkeley Extension – offers back-end computer science courses such as System Administration and Networking as well as front-end classes like Web development and graphic design. Some classes are available online.
5. California College of the Arts – offers Web and graphic design classes such as Adobe Creative Suite bootcamps plus other hard-to-find courses such as creating interactive ePubs for your iPad, Cocoa Touch programming, or a how to use a Wacom tablet.
6. BioCurious – this up-and-coming Biotech workspace in Sunnyvale offers a complete working laboratory. Learn how to do genome sequencing and cloning with their weekend workshops and then start your own genomic experiment – no prerequisite experience necessary!
7. SFSU Extension – SFSU’s quarterly programming and design classes include jQuery, HTML5, Mobile UI design, ActionScript, and WordPress. Many of the classes are available in weekend workshops.
8. Digital Media Playground – teaches digital photography and video production so you’ll no longer feel guilty about carrying around a camera you don’t know how to use. It’s also one of the few places that regularly teaches food photography.
9. The Crucible – prep for Burning Man in no time. These friendly folks offer every Industrial Arts class you can dream of including welding, hula hooping with fire, neon sign making, blacksmithing, and electronics.

If someone’s snickered at your purple comic sans e-mail signature, consider a typography classes. If you are a Project or Product Manager who isn’t totally fluent in geekspeak, look at the Berkeley, SFSU, and Stanford computer science courses. If you are a Sales or Marketing professional who wants to tweak brochures for conferences or start a company blog, take a WordPress, HTML, Photoshop, or InDesign classes. And if you’re a hardcore computer geek, maybe you crave working with something tangible – you’ll love the TechShop and Crucible.

Enjoy!
-Elaine