Several challenges will have to be faced by the staff at Paranal Observatory in order to be well prepared for a seamless integration of the ELT in the current VLT operations scheme. The Telescopes and Instruments Operator group (TIO) is already undergoing changes connected with some of the identified technological and operational needs for the ELT. This paper will have detailed information about the current training needs, group structural changes, the current activities using the adopted engineering-TIO [2] (eTIO) scheme and the staffing plan that will have to be applied in order to keep the centralized support of the biggest world infrastructure in astronomy at the time of the ELT, to handle daily science operations for seven different telescopes, the VLT interferometer and twenty-one scientific instruments in parallel.

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Andres Pino Pavez, Stéphane Brillant, Susana Cerda Hernández, Claudia Cid, Xavier Haubois, Steffen Mieske, Julien Milli, Juan Carlos Muñoz-Mateos, Julio Navarrete, Diego Parraguez, Leonel Rivas, Cristian Romero, and Alain Smette, "Connecting ELT to the current VLT operations scheme: how the telescope and instrument operators, as well as other groups at Paranal Observatory, are preparing the staff for the ELT era," Proc. SPIE 10704, Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems VII, 107041M (Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation: June 14, 2018; Published: 10 July 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2311857.