Hey everyone,
Has anyone here taken the Venus Software Training I course, remotely or on-site? I’m guessing content wise they should be pretty much identical. Aside from the travel costs are there any pros/cons where you might choose one over the other?
I prefer to do my training at the training sites. Why?
Because when you do the training at their sites, you can focus entirely on the training. When you have trainers come to your place of employment for a multi day training session, it’s highly likely that you will be interrupted and/or you’ll peek at Slack and have to “quickly run into lab”.
Con is that it’s more expensive but it’ll pay off for you and the company if you can leverage the training to not just learn but ask really good questions directly that may be specific to your workflow.
For in person, I believe you get hands on with their Hamilton STARs and do a bit of liquid handling portion in person on the instrument.
Thanks @bowlineknot and @luisvillaautomata for the feedback. I should have been more specific in my wording. Instead of remotely I probably should have said “virtually” and “training site” instead of on-site.
I agree though, I think there would be too many distractions if training was done at our site. I feel that I’m tending to lean more towards the training-site course for the reasons you both mentioned.
I personally recommend the on-site as if you progress with Venus Advanced, that is exclusively online (and still great) as far as I know. They take good care of their students on those days.
I second the distractions being lessened as well!
There’s also the benefit of crashing @EricSindelar_Hamilton instruments so you don’t have to crash yours 
Hey, you break it, you buy it! 
Great seeing all the feedback! I just wanted to confirm that the course content is indeed the same with the exception that we don’t have the hands-on instrument time during the remote trainings. As such, the remote training is condensed to 3.5 days as opposed to 4 days for the in-person.
We understand that not all customers have the travel budget or opportunity to travel to one of our Hamilton sites though so we will continue to offer the remote trainings. In addition, we do offer trainings at customer sites for customers that may have larger groups that need training and/or also have obstacles w/r/t travel. These are also hosted by our expert trainers.
If you have any questions, please check out our website where we have more details, training schedule, online registration. etc.
This has all been useful information. Are there significant differences between Venus 5 and 6? We currently have a STARlet running 5 but will be receiving another that (I’m assuming) will be running version 6.
Yes, VENUS 6 has a refreshed UI and the training course contents have been updated to reflect the changes. That being said, the method editor remains the same so the core concepts with respect to defining the system deck and programming methods persists across the versions.
We are planning a one day VENUS refresher and what’s new for trainees that attended previous trainings. Will post more info about that when it is available!
Adding myself as a reminder for when this is sent out.