Most warehouses can describe what an operator does after six months. Few can describe what he was told in his first five days, in what order and by whom. That week is where instruction either lands or quietly does not.
Monday morning, before he picks anything
The first hours are geography and rules, not skills. Where he may walk and where he may not. How pedestrian routes are separated from forklift routes, and what to do where the two cross. What the alarm sounds like, where he goes and who counts heads. How he reports a hazard, a damaged rack upright or a leaking pallet, and what happens after he does.
None of that is optional detail. Belgian Codex art. III.1-23 requires vehicle routes to run at a sufficient distance from doors, gates and pedestrian passages. In the Netherlands, Arbobesluit art. 3.14 covers connecting routes, with pedestrians and internal transport separated as far as possible. The layout is the employer's job. Knowing how to move through it is the operator's, and he only knows it because someone told him.
The first time he sits on a truck
There is no legally required forklift certificate in Belgium or the Netherlands. What the law demands is competence you can demonstrate.
Codex art. IV.3-7, 1° states that self-propelled mobile work equipment may only be driven by workers who have received adequate training for driving it safely. The same article requires organisational measures to keep people on foot out of the working zone. Arbobesluit art. 7.17c lid 1 says mobile work equipment with its own drive is operated by workers who possess specific competence for it. Neither names a certificate, a school or a validity period. The certificate is simply the usual proof, and an expectation of insurers and clients.
What it does not cover is this site: this aisle width, this ramp, this dock, this load, this speed limit. That part is yours to instruct.
The first pallet with a hazard label
The day a hazard label appears on the dock, the operator is inside ADR. Chapter 1.3 applies to anyone whose function relates to the transport of dangerous goods: loaders, packers and warehouse staff, not only drivers. It has three parts: general awareness (1.3.2.1), function-specific training (1.3.2.2) and safety training (1.3.2.3). Under 1.3.2.4 it is topped up periodically to reflect regulatory change, though ADR sets no interval, so any claim of a fixed two-year cycle is invented.
There is no exam and no state certificate for 1.3 training, and you may give it in-house. But 1.3.3 requires the employer to keep records of the training received and make them available on request, so "we explained it at the dock" is not a defensible answer.
Lifting, which hurts later rather than today
Manual handling produces the injuries nobody reports on the day. The Netherlands regulates it in Arbobesluit chapter 5, articles 5.2 to 5.6, with art. 5.5 on information and instruction; Belgium covers it in Codex Book VIII, Title 3. The operator needs the technique, the limits for his own tasks, and permission to use the equipment instead of his back when the queue is long.
What week five looks like
The first week is not the end of it. Procedures get revised, peak season brings a doubled headcount and a rearranged floor, new equipment arrives. Racking checks get assigned, and NEN-EN 15635, a standard rather than a law, expects a weekly visual inspection by a designated and trained employee, recorded in a logbook. Each is a point where January's instruction is out of date.
Aristotl converts your site rules, work instructions and dock procedures into three to five minute courses an operator completes on his own phone, in his own language, before the shift rather than in a classroom on Thursday. Each course carries a knowledge check, and the dashboard shows per site, per role and per version who has finished, with records that export for the onthaal document, the ADR 1.3 file or an art. 8 request.
Bring one document to a demo, your induction checklist or the instruction for your busiest dock, and we will build it into the first week an operator actually gets.