23 August 2017

Singapore will be sending a contingent to the 44th WorldSkills Competition to be held at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre, United Arab Emirates, in October 2017. This year’s competition will see participants from 77 member countries and regions coming together to compete in areas such as Aircraft Maintenance, Bricklaying, Car Painting, and Mechanical Engineering CAD, to name but a few. The WorldSkills Competition is a competition aimed at showcasing and inspiring world-class excellence in skills, and introducing youths to a variety of skilled careers. They are also an opportunity for companies and industries to meet and recruit skilled people who have demonstrated that they are at the top of their game.

The Singapore contingent will comprise of 21 students from the polytechnics and the Institute of Technical Education who will compete in 19 areas of industrial and career skills such as freight forwarding and 3D digital game art, on top of more old-school vocational skills such as cooking or carpentry. Singapore has taken part in the contest since 1995.

One student representing Singapore is Mr Ng Jun Xuan, a third-year digital game art and design student at Nanyang Polytechnic, who beat 13 other competitors at an internal selection last year. At the competition, he will need to design, create and animate 3D game characters and objects, and he will have just 22 hours over about four days to complete a character based on criteria issued only at the start of the contest.

Also in the Singapore contingent this year is 20-year-old Olivia Low, who recently graduated from Temasek Polytechnic with a diploma in logistics and operations management. At WorldSkills, she will compete in the freight forwarding category, where she will have only about three days to complete a simulated task based on a similar challenge faced by a worker in the logistics industry in the real world.

In the last WorldSkills competition held in 2015, Singapore took home 17 awards.