Going for gold — how skills can change lives
Kim Bielenberg talks to Irish gold medal winners at the WorldSkills competition about how the event sets the benchmark
THEY are the Olympians of the skills world. Every two years, the most accomplished apprentices and trainees from Ireland compete at the WorldSkills competition.
These finely-tuned craftsmen and craftswomen have a dazzling array of talents — from mixing cocktails and the ultrasmooth plastering of walls to maintaining a jet aircraft so that it is in perfect order.
Later this year, the Irish champions in their field will fly to Kazan in Russia to represent the country at the 45th WorldSkills competition.
The Irish team will showcase its talents in areas such as aircraft maintenance, beauty therapy, cabinet making, and construction metal work. WorldSkills also has contests in relatively new fields such as building information modelling and cloud computing.
Each member of the Irish team, generally in their early to mid-twenties, will have competed against their peers at national level to secure places in the competition.
Ireland Skills Live 2019 offers an opportunity to see some of the most talented trainees in action. The event will host the national skills finals — and the winners in each event may have the opportunity to represent Ireland in the global competition.
For most of the skills competitions, the contests are open to registered apprentices. But in some fields, the contestants are student trainees.
Ray English of Technical University Dublin, chair of WorldSkills Ireland, says: “The WorldSkills competition encourages excellence in skills and it gives us a chance to benchmark ourselves against other countries.”
The contestants will compete for gold, silver, bronze, and medallions of excellence.
At the last competition in Abu Dhabi in 2017, Ireland won seven medallions.
At the previous WorldSkills in Brazil in 2015, we achieved two gold medals and eight medallions of excellence. Since Ireland started competing in 1957, we have won 59 gold medals.
Ray English says in recent years Ireland has done particularly well in areas such as aircraft maintenance and hospitality.
Ros Wynne from Dublin won a gold medal in 2015 for aircraft maintenance, the fourth Irish gold in that discipline in succession.
So what attracted him to the world of aviation?
“I grew up working with my dad in the family business which was kitchen, bedroom and custom cabinet work. I was always interested in mechanics and engineering. I started a science degree in UCD, but dropped out after first year,” says Wynne.
“The aviation apprenticeship caught my eye, so I moved from Dublin to Shannon to train.
“When I competed in the WorldSkills, I was tested over seven disciplines over four days. We had to carry out
When I competed, I was tested overseven disciplines over four days. We had to carry out an inspection of an Airbus helicopter
an inspection of an Airbus helicopter — checking it like an engineer would do every day.”
In his competition, Ros was competing against 14 other countries. There were 14 competitors in total across all skills on the Irish team.
“It was a great feeling of satisfaction when I won after all the effort that went in from myself and my trainer, Michael Hayes from the Shannon Training Centre.”
Ros completed a fouryear apprenticeship with the Atlantic Aviation Group. He now works as a design engineer at CAE Parc Aviation, creating modifications to aircraft.
Limerick-based Alina Sile also won gold at the WorldSkills event in Sao Paolo.
Now an assistant manager at Castletroy Park Hotel, she was studying at Shannon College of Hotel Management when she won her medal for restaurant service.
Alina’s mentor for the world competition was Ray Cullen, Head of Languages, Tourism and Hospitality at Waterford Institute of Technology.
Alina, who was born in Latvia, was tested in different modules, including bar skills, casual dining and banqueting.
“For bar skills we were making cocktails, carving fruit and serving Prosecco. A lot of it is about the flair with which you present yourself. You have to show how you interact with people.”
In other phases of the contest, she was tested on napkin folding, coffee barista skills, carving and making a flambé.
“Doing the WorldSkills competition is not just all about the skill itself,” says Alina. “It is also about the teamwork.”
Gary Condon is the ultimate smooth operator, having won gold for plastering at WorldSkills in 2011.
Gary qualified as an apprentice at a time when building skills were in low demand in Ireland. But having struck gold at WorldSkills, he was snapped up by French multinational company SaintGobain and moved to Dubai.
Although he says he was unfocused at school, Gary was determined to be a qualified tradesman like his father, who is a stonemason.
After starting out as a carpenter, Gary moved into plastering, and trained with John Finn Plastering based in Carrick-on-Suir, Co Tipperary.
Gary was trained for World Skills by Joe Clarke, who worked in Fás Waterford.
The skills tested in the competitions include building drywall partitions, ceilings and decorative moulding. He built a model of London’s Big Ben.
Gary is now a leading trainer in plastering as Technical Academy Manager for Saint-Gobain Gyproc in the Gulf region.
He is a member of the WorldSkills Champions Trust, a team of past competitors who act as advocates for the competition.
One of their aims is to eliminate the stigma attached to vocational education and trades in order to show that they can be just as fulfilling as a higher level degree.
Their motto is: “Skills change lives.”