The pressure on care keeps growing. Staff shortages rise while the way people want to learn and work is changing. For Elise Spaan, co-founder of Floow.ai, that was exactly the reason to develop a different route — an AI-driven platform that connects education and care practice in a new way.
In theory, education and care already work closely together: students learn at school and gain experience in practice. In reality that collaboration is often more complicated. Educational institutions work with their own systems, care organisations have different digital environments, and supervisors on the care floor frequently have no access to educational systems — while educational supervisors can't see what happens day to day in practice.
The result, Spaan explains, is a kind of digital no-man's-land: an assessment sometimes sits for days or weeks, and guidance runs via scattered emails, phone calls or even WhatsApp. For people who want to push on and learn in practice, that holds them back. Floow.ai sets out to bridge exactly that gap.
The platform doesn't just look at diplomas, but above all at what someone can already do and what they still want to learn. Every employee can follow their own route: those who already have knowledge or experience can move through a training pathway faster. That's especially powerful for increasing intake into care — through people already involved in care but without formal qualifications, such as informal carers, volunteers or staff starting as living-room supervisors.
Floow.ai has existed for two years and is already used in multiple places, with more than 1,000 users working on the platform. Its impact is becoming visible across the country: it was recently rolled out at universities of applied sciences nationwide within the FastSwitch programme for career-switchers, is used at Het Gastenhuis together with ROC Midden Nederland, and in North Holland the collaboration between Talland College and care organisations such as De Zorgcirkel shows what flexible training makes possible in practice.