Highlights

Watch this short highlights video of the Best Practice Exchange and Virtual International Pressure Test.

Youtube needs cookies in order to display videos.
Please accept Marketing Cookies to watch this video.

Best Practice Exchange

We hosted a best practice exchange with international experts and educators to transfer global best practice and champion higher quality training standards within the UK.

Watch the Best Practice Exchange in full.

Kevin Large

WorldSkills UK Training Manager

Brendan Burns

WorldSkills UK Assistant Training Manager

Anders Lantz

Skills Competition Manager for WorldSkills Shanghai

Aleksander Gorbachev

WorldSkills Russian Federation Training Manager

Luke Saunders

Previous Team UK Competitor

Key learnings

Educators need to embrace and make available to students the latest software and technology within this skill (most of which is open source and readily available

We need to update our existing qualifications to keep pace with emerging technology and industry requirements to ensure learners are better prepared when seeking employment opportunities. This can be done by adopting the WorldSkills Occupational Standards more broadly across the UK TVET System

Whilst there are many common technical skills gaps regularly identified in learners there are rather important softer skills than often get overlooked such as working part of a team, communication and problem solving skills. By improving these softer skills it will in turn improve productivity and raise the competency levels of  learners.

Virtual International Pressure Test

This competition was designed to replicate an international WorldSkills Competition format closely; however, the event was developed to be primarily a learning experience for the competitors and the experts. The competition time was reduced from 4.5 hours to 3 hours, use of the Internet was allowed during the competition and as a result the level of technology can be raised a little higher in order to push the competitors to research real-world configurations and technologies. The Test Projects were developed in conjunction with industry technical specialists who are also past WorldSkills competitors or Squad members. They have experience working In enterprise and service provider networks and this reinforced the real-world aspects of the competition.

Countries that took part

UK

Chinese Taipei

Spain

Russian federation

Belarus

Kazakhstan

Germany

Slovenia

Austria

Columbia

China

Japan

South Korea

Switzerland

The event was a technically challenging, confidence building and fun experience for all competitors. It  also served to help experts with the design and implementation of the Test Projects for the four modules, this is particularly important for new experts.

It consisted of:

  • Day 1: Client Server Environment
  • Day 2: Networking Environment
  • Day 3: IoT, DevOps & Programmability Environment
  • Day 4: Troubleshooting & Programmability

Details of the Virtual International Pressure Test

Delivery method, multiple virtual machines per competitor, running in Azure Cloud resources.

Delivery method, one powerful virtual machine per competitor, running in GCP Cloud resources.

Delivery method, one Raspberry Pi4 per competitor plus sensors, actuators and a micro-controller (ESP32 or Pi Zero W)

Delivery method, multiple virtual machines per competitor, running in Azure Cloud resources.

Results

Illustration of Gold Medal

Elizabeth Martin

Spain

Illustration of Gold Medal

Sven Gerber

Switzerland

Illustration of a bronze medal

Anton Polikasov

Russian federation

The event was very fun and I learnt a lot.

Sven Gerber, Switzerland Gold medal winner

We have only just scratched the surface on the potential possibilities of running these virtual international pressure tests for our competitors and experts.

Kevin Large, UK Training Manager for ITNSA

WorldSkills Occupational Standards

Sign up to receive our latest updates to your email

Useful links