  The European Virtual Observatory (VO) initiative organises regular VO schools
since 2008. The goals are twofold: i) to expose early-career European
astronomers to the variety of currently available VO tools and services so that
they can use them efficiently for their own research and; ii) to gather their
feedback on the VO tools and services and the school itself. During the
schools, VO experts guide participants on the usage of the tools through a
series of predefined real science cases, an activity that took most of the
allocated time. Participants also have the opportunity to develop their own
science cases under the guidance of VO tutors. These schools have demonstrated
to be very useful for students, since they declare to regularly use the VO
tools in their research afterwards, and for us, since we have first hand
information about the user needs. Here, we introduce our VO schools, the
approach we follow, and present the training materials that we have developed
along the years.
