Upskilling Labs workshop

Build practical transferable career skills

A workshop series on emerging tech in partnership with DCPL + The Upskilling Labs.

Join the Upskilling Labs for workshops that accompany their peer-led experiential learning programming, where you can joing a project group and build something you care about with emerging technologies. Find the full slate of The Upskilling Labs' events on their Luma page.

August 25: Introduction to AI Coding Agents 

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​About this workshop: Use AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex to build and deploy your own personal website. You will learn how to prompt AI agents to scaffold and edit a working website. No prior coding experience needed.

​Before you arrive, please complete the following setup:

• ​Install the Claude desktop app or Codex
• ​Register for a free GitHub account at github.com
• ​Install Git if you don't already have it — installation instructions here (default options in the installer are fine)

What to bring:

• ​A laptop (with a Codex or Claude Code subscription)
• ​Your resume saved somewhere easy to find (PDF or Word)
• ​A headshot photo

About the Instructor: Nick Wagner is the founder of Learning Journey AI, where he teaches professionals practical AI skills through workshops and coaching. He brings a distinctive policy and research lens to AI education, with experience in AI policy at the National Science Foundation and AI evaluation work at the Institute for Defense Analyses. Nick holds a PhD from Northwestern University.

September 29: Privacy by Design

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About this workshop: ​We are excited to welcome Toni Dumas, privacy and cybersecurity attorney, law professor, and co-founder of Data Pilots, Inc., for this practical workshop on designing products people trust.

• ​What you will learn: You're already thinking about how your product works and what it's like to use. This workshop adds one more lens: the information you ask people for, and what you do with it. Every time someone signs up, fills out a form, or uses a feature, you're asking them to trust you. The choices you make about what to collect, and why, shape whether they actually do. We'll cover privacy by design principles — a simple, people-first framework for designing any signup, form, or feature so it earns trust from the start.
• ​What to bring: Come with something you're actively building — a signup flow, a form, a feature, or even just an idea. You'll work through an example with the group and apply the framework to your own product. No legal, privacy, or coding background needed.
• ​What you will leave with: A clearer way to think about trust in anything you design, plus a reusable handout you can come back to whenever you're building something new.

About the instructor: Toni Dumas is passionate about helping small businesses and founders build lasting trust with the people they serve. A privacy and cybersecurity attorney and law professor, she started out designing websites and has spent years advising companies on privacy and trust in their digital products. As co-founder of Data Pilots, Inc., she has learned to build as a founder herself and recently completed the first DC Founder Institute Penn West program. She also runs the privacy and trust consultancy Data Risk Group LLC.

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