Many of the job vacancies I apply before list knowledge of GIS as either a required or desired skill.

Are there any institutions, online programmes or other resources that provide training and experience in this?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

"GIS" is a bit of a vague term. Could you be a bit more specific? Is it marketing? planning? programming? something else? Which industry?

I work in the field, there are certainly courses to be done, but you'd really need to know which direction you're aiming in. I think you can do a general university course but I take it that's not what you're going for.

Sure, I'm probably just a bit narrow-minded as I've only heard it within the context of my own studies (environment).

I'd like to learn about how to use GIS software to study and model environmental changes (esp. forests) in response to both natural and man-made factors.

I'm basically just looking for some kind of basic introductory training so that I have a foundation to start building from in the future. Thanks for reaching out

TBH, I wouldn't know where to tell you to start in that field. I work with utilities and I started out capturing electricity networks and got that by saying I "knew a bit of CAD".

I think ESRI is a player in the enviromental area, making yourself familiar with the tools would be a good start, they offer courses (though I have no idea how much they cost). You can't guarantee every job will use it but it's def one of the biggest players.

ESRI Training
ESRI Natural resources apps

You might also want to check out GRASS, one of the biggest open source GIS systems.

http://www.degrees.uzh.ch/studiengan...ng=en#keywords

The only place that I can think of is the Science Faculty (Geography) at the University of Zurich

Thanks to you both for a good starting point, I'll start checking things out (although Zürich may be a bit too far)...

You can try ESRI at Nyon as they sometimes run GIS courses in English for the UN. They had a course just last month.
http://esri.ch/fr/training/courses.html
Otherwise the ESRI site already given has some good training info and links.

The EPFL in west Lausanne have a GIS department, with an Austrian professor (Forgotten his name!)

http://geolep.epfl.ch/files/content/...ndslide_3d.pdf

http://emploi.epfl.ch/

I used to use it in a health-marketing setting - basically to understand where patients lived, if diagnoses clustered by location, to understand the distribution of demographic characteristics and where facilities where located.

Basically you've got to have a geographic variable for each data point (either lattitude and longitude or something that can convert to the same.

Looking at the spatial distribution of data can be very powerful.

Geography departments are most likely to have it - but also public health and economics might have resources or courses.

I used MapInfo, which was a bit of a beast - a lot of overhead.

You could try http://www.giscentrum.lu.se/english/education.htm

They have an online masters course, but from memory I think you can do individual units as well. It's free for EU/EEA citizens too.