Dutch robot employment agency to train people to work with robots

Smart Robotics, the Netherlands' first employment agency for robots, will soon offer a training course to teach people how to work with robots. "Automation means that jobs disappear, that is unavoidable. We want to retrain people who previously did the robot's job. In many cases they will work with the robot in the future", Heico Sandee, co-founder of Smart Robotics, said to NU.nl.

"Imagine that a production assistant piled boxes on an assembly line", Sandee continued. "That employee we can now train to keep six robots working on stacking boxes." The company hopes to start this three-day training program by the end of this year. "We want to start with training 300 people per month, but that should eventually grow tenfold."

Smart Robotics was founded in May 2015 and currently has 15 employees and about 30 robots.