Ruben Visser

I am 25 years old and I come from The Netherlands. I'll be living in Canada for a while and I'm looking for a job.

I started working officially at the age of 16 at a local restaurant. The name of the restaurant is De Stripe and I was working there as a dishwasher. After a while, the owner asked me to come work in the kitchen. This is where I learned to work under pressure because at times, we had to work as fast as possible, considering it was a busy restaurant.

After that I went to work for Van Smaak, in a bigger kitchen. This company made meals for thousands of people, many of whom were elderly or had some kind of condition. There were lots of dietary preferences that we had to take into consideration. Because this kitchen was a lot bigger than your average, I had a lot of coworkers and I learned to work in teams.

My third job is different from the first two. Ibis is a construction company that manufactures ships. Here I learned a little bit of welding and grinding. This job taught me heavy working, seeing that steel is a heavy material.

Then I began to work for a wholesale company as an order picker. The stockroom was a big place and I decided to work on foot. Taking up to about 40.000 steps a night was a lot at first, but I learned that you can get used to it and even benefit from it.

My current job is at a wood cutting company where we cut, drill and mill pieces of wood to make some sort of do it yourself package for houses. We do not put them together, but the companies that do so, get the components already adapted.

I had to look up what is comparable in Canada to my schooling, seeing that the school systems are different in The Netherlands. In Canada I would have a secondary school diploma and a college diploma.

In the Netherlands you get to choose between 4 packages of subjects and personalize this to some degree. I chose the profile of nature and mechanics and I personalized it with philosophy. The main subjects are Dutch, English, biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics (analysis and geometry) along with a few other subjects.

After I got my diploma I went on to ‘college’ and studied technische bedrijfskunde for two years. A litteral translation would be ‘technical business school’. It is a bachelor school of business in engineering and you learn to analyze processes within companies and how to make them work more efficiently or effectively.