Student BASE becomes a compass for international Brainport talent

At Career Compass Netherlands, more than 120 students, graduates, companies and ecosystem partners gathered at High Tech Campus Eindhoven to discuss one of Brainport’s most urgent questions: how do we make sure international talent not only comes here but also stays?

“Wow. What a nice room we have here today. Beautiful, colourful, international.” With those words, Dr. Navid Mohamadi opened the evening at Student BASE on the High Tech Campus. It was not just a polite welcome. It was also the point of the evening. The room itself, filled with students, graduates, experienced professionals, company representatives and ecosystem partners from 38 nationalities, showed what Brainport already has: a pool of international talent that is diverse, ambitious and ready to contribute.

But Mohamadi, founder of SHEXON and moderator of the evening, immediately added the other side of the story. “We have a problem.” The Brainport region needs talent, he said, yet too many international graduates leave the Netherlands shortly after finishing their studies. At the same time, many small and medium-sized companies struggle to become visible to exactly the people they need. “We all know ASML and Philips,” Mohamadi said. “But how many of us know smaller-sized companies?”

Career Compass Netherlands was created to bring those two worlds closer together. The event was organised by SHEXON, Holland Expat Centre South, EUFlex and TU/e Alumni Relations, with Student BASE as host. What started as an idea for a practical, human-centred evening for international talent became a fully booked event, with over 150 tickets reserved and more than 120 people in the room.

Still a canteen, already a base

For Student BASE, the evening was also a milestone. Bert-Jan Woertman, project manager at Student BASE, called it “a great start” for the initiative. “We’re in stealth mode still,” he said, smiling at the room. “As you can see, it still looks a bit like a canteen. It actually is still a canteen, but then we are using it as a Student BASE.”

That description fits the stage Student BASE is in. Earlier this year, IO+ described the initiative as a new heart for talent on the High Tech Campus: a place where education, companies, and societal partners can connect in a structured way, and where students can work on real-world challenges from industry. The ambition is not simply to offer square meters, but to create a physical and social meeting point for students, companies, startups and ecosystem partners.

Career Compass Netherlands at Student BASE

Woertman explained that 30 to 40 Fontys students are already working there daily on multidisciplinary challenges for companies on and outside the campus. Later this year, once Student BASE becomes more visible, he expects more assignments, internships and company challenges to become available. But his broader message was about diversity. The day before, he had attended another regional event, he said, where the room was “only male, fifty-plus-ish” while the topic was innovation and future economic growth. “If you want to become more productive,” Woertman said, “you need a diverse community inside your company to work on innovation.”

Looking at the audience in front of him, he added: “That’s why it’s great to have this generation here today, to talk about impact and innovation and sustainable economic growth, for the future of not only our region but for the future of the world.”

A booming region still has to become a home

Rabobank’s Marc Cootjans then took the audience on a visual tour of the Brainport region’s future. His message was optimistic, but also demanding. Eindhoven and Amsterdam, he said, are the two Dutch regions where economic growth has been double the national average over the past decade. Brainport is one of Europe’s rare high-tech clusters where R&D and manufacturing happen at industrial scale. With semiconductors, high-tech systems and possibly defence-related innovation, the region’s strategic importance will only grow.

“The future is yours in a region that is booming and is going to boom even further,” Cootjans told the audience.

Marc Cootjans, Career Compass Netherlands at Student BASE

He showed the new ASML campus near Eindhoven Airport, the expansion of Brainport Industries Campus, and the transformation of Eindhoven’s station area. Where there are now no homes, only offices, around 10,000 homes are planned. Brainport Industries Campus 2, he said, will be two and a half times the size of the current campus. The region is heading for “a growth leap,” or schaalsprong, with tens of thousands of additional jobs.

But Cootjans’ most important point was not about jobs alone. Economic growth, he argued, will happen. The real challenge is whether Eindhoven can become a place where people want to build a life. “The economy will take care of itself,” he said. “We need to make sure that the facilities are there in order to sustain that growth and to provide a nice living environment.”

That means homes, culture, sports, public space and iconic buildings. A city can attract workers with jobs. It can retain people only if it becomes a home.

Visa rules, coffee chats and confidence

After the keynote, the room split into parallel sessions: one on visa and legal pathways for international talent, one for companies interested in hiring internationals, and an interactive Dutch citizenship game for those who did not need visa information.

The visa session made clear how practical the barriers can be. Non-EU students learned about working while studying, internships, the orientation year, the highly skilled migrant route, the EU Blue Card, permanent residence, Dutch citizenship, and the 30% tax ruling. One message stood out: the orientation year, or zoekjaar, is one of the most important routes for graduates who want to stay. But students were also warned not to wait until the last moment. A gap in residence status can become a serious problem.

Later, the panel discussion brought the legal and economic questions back to lived experience. Sutra Adino from Studyportals, Nisreen Ajdad from Capgemini, Jaimini Boender from Sendcloud and Shreya Surana from Philips spoke openly about rejection, identity, confidence and Dutch workplace culture.

Adino did not soften the reality. When she looked back at her first job search in the Netherlands, she said, “All I could think was the amount of struggle, the amount of rejections, and the amount of loneliness.” Especially as a non-European international, she said, integration can be hard. Her message to the audience was not that it becomes easy, but that the struggle is real and shared.

Boender, who grew up in the United States, noticed another cultural shift. In the US, he said, job searching can be very “salesy”: “No job too big, no job too small. I’m there at any time.” In the Netherlands, he had to learn a different rhythm. Even going on holiday, he joked, is “really okay” here.

Career Compass Netherlands at Student BASE

Talking about skills

Ajdad, who came to the Netherlands as a refugee, spoke about learning how to present herself. “I had to understand how networking and self-presentation work here,” she said. Coming from a culture where candidates may be expected to strongly promote themselves, Dutch interviews required a different balance. For her, the challenge was “talking about my skills and not feeling less.”

Surana’s advice was to look beyond degrees. “Everyone has the same degree as you,” she told the audience. “Think about what makes you unique.” Student jobs, tutoring, student boards, side projects and bicultural experiences may seem secondary, but they can become the difference in an interview. “Don’t get to know me as an employee,” she said of her own approach. “Get to know me as a human.”

That message returned several times. A supermarket job is not just a supermarket job if it teaches you Dutch working culture, customer interaction, adaptability and resilience. A technical degree is not enough if you cannot explain what your work means for a company. “I got these hypothetical guns of this technical stuff,” Boender said of his studies in computer science and data science. But at work, he discovered another skill was needed: explaining what you did, why it matters and how it creates business value.

The Dutch language came up as well, not as a demand for perfection, but as a bridge. For Ajdad, learning Dutch helped her connect beyond the international bubble. It helped her understand news, jokes and daily life. “Language is less about perfection,” she said, “it’s more about connections.”

“No doesn’t always mean no”

The panel’s most practical advice came when Mohamadi asked for one sentence about job market preparation. Adino answered with one long sentence, carefully punctuated out loud: “Rejection is part of your journey, comma, sounds cliché, but trust me, the more rejections you get, the closer you are to the end goal, period.”

Ajdad advised honesty: “Authenticity creates much stronger connection than trying to be perfect.” Boender reframed rejection as fit: “A rejection is not a judgment. It’s just about fit. It’s about a vibe.” Surana urged students to apply not only for what they can already do, but for what they can grow into. “Even if you can do sixty per cent, seventy per cent of it, have the confidence and the aspiration.”

Her own story made that point concrete. At Philips, Surana said, she was let go twice during years of restructuring. She stayed, applied again, fought for new roles and was promoted. “No doesn’t always mean no,” she told the room. “Nobody else cares about your future as much as you do.”

From networking event to retention system

The final part of the evening gave companies and organisations the floor. Studyportals presented itself as an international, English-speaking edtech company based in Eindhoven. Avular spoke about robotics, TU/e roots and recruiting engineering talent from across the world. DIFFER, Cyberalloy and HighTechXL showed different routes into research, deep tech and entrepreneurship. HighTechXL’s message was direct: “We don’t wait for the future to happen. We build it.”

Mohamadi closed by returning to the original problem. SHEXON, he explained, wants to reverse the hiring flow: not only have talent apply for jobs, but create a pool of bicultural talent and match people with companies based on skills, ambitions, personality and cultural fit. “We are not a recruitment tool,” he said. “We are an integration system.”

That may also be the best description of the evening itself. Career Compass Netherlands was not only a networking event, a visa session or a company fair. It was a small rehearsal for the kind of ecosystem Brainport says it wants to be: international, practical, open, and serious about retaining the people it already attracts.

Student BASE still looks partly like a canteen. But on this evening, it already did what it was built for: bringing people into the same room, lowering the threshold, and turning talent from an abstract regional challenge into a human conversation.