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“We teach fishing, we don’t catch fish”
Euflex Spouse Career Support
5 februari 2009 - TU/e is tentatively doing more to look after partners of new staff members. The university’s recruitment and selection agency Euflex Employment Services has started a ‘Spouse Career Support’ service for partners of incoming staff. The first results are quite positive, but Euflex is still only working with a few partners at a time.
Susanne Borer. Photo: Jan Timmermans

Swiss Susanne Borer (33) followed her Italian partner Professor Andrea Fiore from Lausanne to Eindhoven last April. She found her first job in the Netherlands three months later and now works for @leisure-group in Eindhoven in product support, looking after customers who rent out their (second) homes to tourists via this company. Borer speaks her native German, as well as French, Italian and English. Under a year after arriving, she is already quite fluent in Dutch.

“I needed some time to figure out what kind of job it would make sense to apply for. My education and experience is in marketing communications, but this job is an excellent way for me to start out in the Dutch employment market. I’m making good use of my language skills, although it can be draining to keep switching languages. Meanwhile I’m also learning Dutch and getting work experience in a Dutch company”, she explains. “I interviewed for three jobs before I accepted @leisure’s offer; one interview was unsuccessful, one job I turned down.”

Approach
During her first months in the Netherlands Borer was a regular visitor to Euflex, where consultants Marijke Schobben and Saskia van Meurs helped her plan her approach to the local employment market. The support offered is on a strictly individual level. “In this case we looked at the opportunities in marketing communications for someone with hardly any Dutch and concluded that Susanne needed to improve her Dutch before trying to get into her own field”, says Schobben. “But we also saw that she has a lot to offer and could perhaps find something in tourism to start with. We talked about which organisations she could approach, what her CV should cover and how you should word a job application in the Netherlands.”

Euflex director Leo Robben continues: “Basically, we teach our clients to fish in this particular pond, but we don’t catch their fish for them. We try to make it possible for people to operate independently with some backing from us.”

Susanne Borer: “Apart from the support in looking for employment, I really appreciated having somewhere to go with all my questions about Holland while I was settling in. For example, we have a different education system and they explained how things work here.”

“But Euflex can’t think of everything. In the position I was hired for, I was expected to drive around the Netherlands and Germany to visit clients. My employers just assumed I would drive; we didn’t speak about it beforehand. Silly me, I thought I would be flying. Traffic in the Netherlands is far busier and more aggressive than in Switzerland, where I didn’t drive much. When I tried to use the TomTom system I got stranded because streets were blocked and all those trucks on the road are intimidating. I found it all really scary.”

“I was glad to change to an office job. At the moment I’m quite happy at work. People are open and friendly and I feel welcome. I think I even found my way more quickly in this new job than I would have expected to in a new job at home.”

Step forward
“Spouse Career Support is one of the ways TU/e is trying to become more attractive to talented international personnel. An attractive employer must also look after partners or spouses of staff who leave their countries to take a job here. I absolutely agree with this thinking and I think it’s a step forward”, says Robben.

The tailored career coaching program consists of weekly meetings with a coach and some home assignments for a period of three months. The bill for Euflex’s help is footed either by the university (Department) or the new arrivals themselves. At the moment only individual support is available, but Euflex is considering setting up small classes for new arrivals who want to get a job in the Netherlands./.