Defense is becoming increasingly better at retaining people’s loyalty. Last year, 4,500 people joined, according to outgoing State Secretary Gijs Tuinman (BBB). While Defense had long suffered from shortages, the 43 Mechanized Brigade in Havelte now has to do everything it can to train everyone.
“It is a huge achievement,” explains Brigadier General Remco van Ingen. According to Defense, the figures are difficult to specify because the organization is constantly changing and depends on new recruits, lateral entry and departures and is also expanding in the number of positions. According to Van Ingen, his brigade is currently 80 percent full.
That was different three years ago when approximately a quarter of the workplaces at the brigade in Havelte were unfilled. This was partly due to unattractive collective labor agreements and cutbacks. Moreover, in the technical sector the outflow was already greater than the inflow.
Defense is therefore busy catching up. Van Ingen: “On the one hand, we have added additional positions and on the other hand, the workforce has grown by 5 percent.”
The influx is so large that the thousands of new soldiers cannot be trained in the usual places in Assen and Schaarsbergen. Those locations are too full for that. Nationally, people are therefore increasingly moving to the brigade in Havelte, which itself has already received 500 more people this year.
“It has always been the case that we provide support when extra capacity was needed,” says Van Ingen. “But you see that it is increasingly reaching us and that we will be doing that as standard for the foreseeable future.”
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