WorldSkills UK offers a chance to shine

. Winning a national competition in fields such as mechanical engineering, mechatronics and aerospace engineering could lead to a place on the UK team that will head to Calgary, Canada to compete at WorldSkills 2009 – or to London for WorldSkills 2011. The ‘Mechanical Engineering: CADD’ category closes on 31 March, while others are open until 18 April. The competition is open to people under 25. For the mechatronics discipline, for example, entrants are tested on: designing, building and testing pneumatic, electrical circuits and PLC programmes for sequential and non-sequential tasks; mechanically assembling a given set of components to a specification; electro-pneumatic circuit simulation; and adding new functionality and operations on a given application. Simon Bartley, chief executive of UK Skills, said: “If young people excel in a vocational skill I encourage them to enter the 2008 WorldSkills UK competitions. Likewise, if employers or tutors have an outstanding student or employee, they should give them the chance to get recognition for their work.”