Expat Spouses Initiative at the Vision, Robotics & Motion Fair to meet potential employers

It is a weird phenomenon: on the one hand, there is a huge shortage of trained people in high-tech, and at the same time there is this untapped supply of talent: the spouses of all those engineers who have come to work at Dutch high-tech companies. Like their partners, who have been scouted from all over the world to come and work in the Netherlands, their travelling partners are often valuable talents for local Dutch companies. But it is difficult for them to find the right companies, and for many SMEs this group is simply invisible.

To bring both worlds together and open up the possibilities for a potential match, Mikrocentrum invited ten expats from the Expat Spouses Network to their Vision, Robotics, and Motion fair. "These travelling spouses and partners of highly skilled migrants working in the Brainport Eindhoven region form a unique pool of professionals," explains Susanne Bruinsma of Mikrocentrum. "Given the shortages in the current labour market, it is perplexing that these highly skilled, often experienced professionals, are overlooked in the local labour market."

Bruinsma took her action as an ambassador for the Woman for Woman programme. "From that role, I saw a nice link with the skills of the spouses and the companies at the fair, with the aim of increasing the chances of a potential match with this visit." The Women for Women programme is an Expat Spouses initiative in collaboration with the Holland Expat Center South and supported by the Province of North Brabant.

Kavitha Varathan is one of those expat spouses; she has been active in the network for years, helping other partners find their way in the Brainport region. Even after all these years, she still wonders what goes wrong. "Internationals are not aware of most local opportunities outside the big employers, and SMEs, start-ups and scale-ups looking for talent do not know that they can access top talent available locally."

Varathan helped organise the visit to the Vision, Robotics and Motion fair and is enthusiastic about it. "Activities like this help close this gap. The participating professionals were interested in the innovations on display, which gave us a good look at the companies present. And the companies present now have several international talents on their radar, so it really is a win-win situation."

The Vision, Robotics, and Motion trade fair is a two-day event on 7 and 8 June at the Brabanthallen in 's-Hertogenbosch. More than 100 leading suppliers from Benelux and Germany will show their latest developments and smart solutions in the field of Industry 4.0. Entry is free.