Niels: From Housekeeper to Trainer

Niels Schuiling has many years of experience in the cleaning industry. He started out with an internship as a housekeeper. He learned a lot there, but above all, it gave him a different perspective on the profession.

As he himself says: “Everyone cleans at home. But working as a cleaner is different. You do it several times a day and with professional supplies. It’s truly a profession.”

After his internship, Niels started working as a housekeeper at EW Facility Services. There, he gained hands-on experience in the field.

The location where he worked was later acquired. Eventually, that location—along with Niels—returned to EW.

Thanks to his many years of experience as a housekeeper, Niels has a good understanding of what it’s like on the job. He’s familiar with the hustle and bustle and knows what it’s like to juggle the needs of guests, the client, and the tasks that need to be done.

He now draws on that experience every day in his work as a trainer.

Of course, the transition to becoming a trainer didn’t happen overnight. In addition to his experience as a housekeeper, Niels also completed training to become a trainer.

He completed part of that training through a training agency. He learned most of it in-house, alongside his fellow trainers Anke and Trudy. That way, he not only learned how to conduct a training session, but also how we do it at EW.

Niels describes it as an intensive learning process. Every trainer has their own style, and he learned something from each of them. Those different experiences now shape his own teaching style.

And he continues to grow in that area as well. He’s getting better and better at figuring out what works for him, and above all, he wants to convey his enthusiasm for the field. He also wants to show his colleagues why training sessions are valuable and how they can help them in their day-to-day work.

Niels’s own experience as a housekeeper helps him with this. He knows what it’s like to be a participant in a training session himself and can easily put himself in the shoes of the colleagues who are now in his group.

In addition to providing training, Niels also performs property scans. He’s familiar with that as well from his time as a housekeeper.

Because of this, he knows that a scan like that can feel like an evaluation. Now, in his role as a trainer, he sees it differently. An object scan is actually intended to identify where support is needed.

As Niels himself says: “Not everything has to be perfect. The point is to identify where we can provide support.”

From a housekeeping intern to a housekeeper and eventually a trainer: Niels has now seen various aspects of the profession.

His story shows that you don’t always have to know exactly what your next step will be. Sometimes an opportunity comes along that might make you wonder at first: Is this really right for me? For Niels, that move into coaching turned out to be exactly the right one.