Supportive management and a highly skilled team with genuinely good chemistry, is a combination that's harder to find than people assume. Competence alone doesn't make a team work well together, and goodwill alone doesn't get results. Having both makes the day-to-day considerably easier, and honestly, more enjoyable.
What is your role at Europol?
I spend my days making sure the unglamorous machinery of IT - the tickets, the incidents, the processes nobody notices until they break - actually works.
What do you find exciting about working at Europol?
What excites me about Europol is that this operational discipline connects directly to something that genuinely matters: here, keeping services running reliably is a small but real part of making Europe safer.
What has your experience been of living in The Hague?
I don't actually live in The Hague - I'm based in a small town near Amsterdam, where I was already living when I was recruited to Europol. I moved to the Netherlands in 2015, so by the time this role came along I'd already built a life here. The commute is a trade-off I've made peace with, and having Amsterdam on my doorstep while working on something this mission-driven feels like the right balance.
How has your experience at Europol contributed to your learning and development throughout your career?
Europol raised my internal bar on what "good enough" means. In most organisations, a service outage is inconvenient. Here, the stakes behind the systems sharpen your thinking fast and you learn to design for resilience, not just recovery, and to justify every decision on both operational and political grounds. It's made me a better service manager and a more deliberate leader.
What motivates you most in your daily work?
Seeing the connection between something I do professionally and the mission of Europol that it ultimately supports. It's easy to lose sight of that in day-to-day ICT (Information and Communications Technology) work. Motivation comes from remembering that the ticket isn't the point, the outcome is.
What do you highly appreciate about your working environment?
Supportive management and a highly skilled team with genuinely good chemistry. It's a combination that's harder to find than people assume. Competence alone doesn't make a team work well together, and goodwill alone doesn't get results. Having both makes the day-to-day considerably easier, and honestly, more enjoyable.
Name one thing you didn’t know about Europol before joining but found impressive after becoming part of the agency:
How much genuine international cooperation happens behind the scenes, day to day, without fanfare. From the outside you imagine bureaucracy; from the inside, you see how much coordinated, practical work goes into it.
Do you have any advice for young professionals beginning their careers in EU institutions, bodies and agencies?
Build up your patience - EU institutions move deliberately, not slowly (even though it might seem like it from the outside), and there's a difference once you learn to see it. Build real expertise before you build a network; the network matters, but people remember competence first. And don't underestimate operational or administrative roles - the people who keep things running are the ones who understand the organisation best.