Team UK have sailed through timed tasks on the second day of competition. After an exciting first day of new experiences competing on a scale they have never seen before, most of the 28 champions settled into the task at hand – focusing on timed modules. In CNC milling, competitors receive a customer request to machine process parts for a range of uses such as household equipment, cars, ships, oil rigs and aerospace, and must correctly programme their CNC mill to grind, weld and mill parts throughout the entire production process. Yesterday, UK competitor Tomas Ankers, from Wrexham in Wales, had just over four hours to programme a tugboat, which involved setting up the software and then machining the parts, which he finished this morning. “I was happy with how I set it up during familiarisation,” he said. “There were some challenges and some mistakes, but I kept focused and kept my head switched on and managed to ride out the challenges,” he added. The challenges were mainly tuning out the crowds of schoolchildren and members of the public visiting his workstation. “Where I’ve been positioned on the stand is really busy, but what I found is really important is to focus on the next five minutes, which blocks out the distractions,” he explained. Under the pressure of competition, mistakes can happen, and panic can set in, but Ankers says he uses his five-minutes-at-a-time method to take a step back and reassess. “You know as soon as the time has gone, you can’t come back and fix anything, so it’s important to just look ahead to the next step,” he said. Ankers competed in EuroSkills Herning last year, where he won a medal of excellence, and said he has learned a lot and built his confidence from his first competition experience. Meanwhile, aircraft mechanic Elyot Harmston (pictured) completed one of his five modules of the four-day competition today. On day one, he had electrical and engine problems to solve, but today was more relaxed. Harmston at work “I think there’s been a theme for aircraft [maintenance] this cycle and this competition that everything is really tight on time and you have to go flat out the entire time,” he said. “I’ve been sweating a lot,” he chuckled. To manage his pace, Harmston has a stopwatch on his desk to keep track of his time. Tomorrow, his final day of competition, involves cutting and shaping sheet metal to do structural repairs on an aircraft. “You’ve just got to get your head down and get on with it,” he added. Checking out the competition Both Harmston and Ankers had some time in the afternoon to tour the competition floor for the first time, see their teammates and check out other skills that entice them. If he wasn’t an aircraft mechanic, Harmston has his eye on the bakery and cooking competitions. Though he is not at the WorldSkills occupational standard level – Harmston said he gets by “most of the time” – he was intrigued by different layouts of non-engineering skills. “You get very familiar with your own competition and the minute details, it’s interesting to see how other competitions are set up.” Rawlings writes: If we want young people to choose technical routes, we have to show them what is possible One of the best conversations I had at WorldSkills Shanghai today was not about medals, machinery or competition scores. It was about inspiration. I spoke with James, a gold medal-winning cabinet maker, and Nathan, who hopes to compete next year, about their own journeys, what WorldSkills has meant to them and what we need to do differently back in the UK if we want more young people to understand the power of technical skills and skills excellence. Both were incredibly positive about what WorldSkills had given them. Not just technical development, but confidence, ambition, networks and a platform for their futures. James has his own cabinet-making business in my home county, so I have a plan to meet up with him when we are home! As we talked, they were clear about something fundamental: young people need to see these opportunities much earlier. They talked about the importance of good careers information across academic, vocational and technical pathways; of showing young people role models they can relate to; of giving them hands-on experiences; and of making competitions and skills excellence much more visible. They also felt colleges and ITP’s needed the support (money) and confidence to embed WorldSkills more widely, so that teaching and support staff could identify, encourage and develop young people with the potential to go further. I could not agree more. As a parent, I used to take my own children religiously to The Skills Show at the NEC. It was noisy, exciting, hands-on and enormous. They could see apprentices, employers, colleges and competitors. They could try things, the result, well for me better day out than a theme park and for them well one of them went on to do an apprenticeship, the other has just started university. Their routes have been different, but neither grew up thinking there was only one definition of success. So the question I keep coming back to in Shanghai is: how do we create the scale of inspiration needed for our young people? This matters even more now. The government has just announced new vocational GCSEs, designed to give pupils access to vocational learning alongside the academic core. That creates a huge opportunity, but it also raises an obvious challenge. If we are going to ask a 14 year old to start thinking seriously about a vocational or sector pathway, surely they first need the chance to understand what those sectors actually are? You cannot choose what you have never seen. That means starting earlier. It means giving young people experiences, role models and encounters with employers before key decisions are made. It means showing them excellence, not simply telling them that technical education exists. WorldSkills already has extraordinary young people who can do that. Its competitions are designed to develop technical, personal and employability skills, and its own careers offer uses role models and practical demonstrations to expose young people to technical routes. The opportunity now is to connect all of that much more deliberately to schools, colleges, families and the choices young people are making. James and Nathan reminded me today that skills excellence is not just something to celebrate when somebody reaches an international competition. It can be the thing that makes another young person think: maybe I could do that too. And that is the real power of WorldSkills.