Bonding at a bootcamp before their march east to China

It’s half past seven on a sunny Saturday morning and two dozen of the UK’s most talented young tradespeople are on their feet, running through a pre-match warm-up.

This is Team UK’s final push before WorldSkills Shanghai, and after 18 months of training and with less than 70 days to go, there’s no time to waste.

The group flies out to China in September to join 1,500 competitors from more than 80 countries, all chasing gold, silver and bronze stardom at the “skills Olympics”.

The 28-hour bootcamp, held last weekend, is a final chance for the entire squad to train together and refine tactics for competition, evaluate their psychological mindset and, for at least one competitor, get a lesson in not sleeping in.

Oliver Coombs, an apprentice with BIMTek in Bath who competes in additive manufacturing, misses the early wake-up call entirely.

His excuse is he had been waiting for a fellow team member to arrive from Scotland the previous evening, “so I stayed up a little later for him to get here,” he says.

The morning energiser, comprising a mix of physical activity and team bonding, will be good practice for the team out in China. The group will run through the same pre-match routine on every day of competition in Shanghai.

The bootcamp, run at the University of Warwick, also involves sessions designed to make competitors dig deep.

WorldSkills UK psychologist Louise Kerr encourages squad members to break down their goal of victory into manageable targets, such as examining scoring criteria and sharpening awareness of their own personal strengths.

For Coombs, who began 3D printing as a hobby seven years before his lecturer at Bath College entered him for a competition, the exercise does not come naturally.

“I’m terrible at self-reflection,” he says.

“One of the things we had to do was ask ourselves why we are doing this. I answered, ‘why not? I enjoy doing it’.

“Everyone around me sees my potential to do well at Shanghai. I’m taking their word for it because I’m very bad at saying that I can.

“I definitely have more of a motivation now to live up to expectations. I don’t want to be too self-deprecating about it, but I also don’t want to be too up myself.”

Elsewhere, renewable energy competitor Madeleine Warburton is taking her ambitions in her stride.

She is an apprentice with RWE where she works on offshore wind turbines, and joined Squad UK ahead of WorldSkills Lyon in 2024 but didn’t make the final cut for the team until now.

“I knew from the start I wanted to get as much out of this as possible,” she says.

“I really threw myself into it. I do want to aim for a medal but I know if I focus and fixate on that, I won’t be performing as well as I could do.”

She says the pressure of a WorldSkills competition is, in some ways, easier than her day job.

“Doing it through WorldSkills you’re doing it in a safer environment, where you’re training under pressure but it’s a known pressure.

“Whereas when I’m working on the turbines, we’ve got weather pressure, the sea state, we’ve got lightning fronts coming in. There’s a lot of unknowns that can come out of nowhere.”

Both the additive manufacturing and renewable energy competitions were introduced at the WorldSkills 2022 special edition. The UK first participated in the events in Lyon two years later but did not come away with any medals.

During the summer, Team UK will continue their rigorous schedule with training managers, including international pressure test “friendlies” against overseas peers.

Robot systems integration duo Peter Jenkins and Pratham Lohia recently returned from a friendly in China, and web technologies competitor Finn Gallagher is also heading to the host country this month for training.

Marginal gains

Back in Warwick, as the competitors take part in exercises, Team UK’s training managers learn about marginal gains, a practice that helps competitors order their tasks during competition.

“We’re trying to build on the baseline knowledge and understanding but it’s also about being tactical that is going to give competitors an edge,” says Parisa Shirazi, director of standards at WorldSkills UK.

Christian Notley, cabinet making training manager and WorldSkills expert since 2011, leads the session and uses the bootcamp to brief the team on a significant change to this year’s competition: fully blind test projects.

For the first time, WorldSkills International organisers will withhold details of competition tasks from competitors until competition day.

The change is an attempt to curb so-called “hot-housing”, where some countries recruit and drill competitors specifically for WorldSkills events instead of developing rounded workplace competence.

Shirazi is pleased by the move, and says it will create a “level playing field” for all participating countries.

“Some projects used to be shared amongst participants. What that resulted in is people training specifically on one element,” she explains.

“For us in the UK, we’re not training just for competition. Well, we are, to some degree, but most importantly you’ll be better in the workplace because you’ve got a full set of skills at your disposal that you’ve been trained in over this period of time.

“That’s why we’re good at innovation, creativity and problem solving. Our competitors are able to adapt and adjust to whatever that project may be.”

By the evening, the Team UK members are ceremonially presented with their ‘enamels’, the silver badges worn by competitors at opening and closing ceremonies.

The squad have just enough time to squeeze in some light relief from their packed schedule to catch England’s World Cup match against Norway.

WorldSkills Shanghai runs from September 22 to 27. Team UK are set to take on rivals from more than 80 countries across 24 skills disciplines.

FE Week is the media partner of WorldSkills UK and Team UK.