World Skills Competition

Posted by: Graeme Hall Dec 1, 03:55 pm Comment on this articlePermlink

I have just returned from the 39th World Skills Competition held in Shizuoka, Japan where I was privileged to be the UK’s Technical Delegate for the fourth successive competition.

The UK achieved 11th place out of 46 entries, on average point score, with 13 of our 21 strong team individually scoring more than the 500 points considered to be “World Class” – an excellent result.

What is significant is the range of countries that outscored the UK. Japan, Korea and Switzerland always do well at World Skills and their investment in education and training is well known.

However, the emergence of Brazil, Singapore, Chinese Taipei and Thailand is less obvious and provides strong evidence of the global competition facing the UK as more and more countries invest ever increasing resources in higher-level skills training.

The Leitch report highlighted the need for the UK to make rapid progress to increase the number of workers with intermediate and higher level skills – the World Skills competition provides practical evidence that even as we improve, our competitors are also improving and challenges to our market position will come from all corners of the globe.

There has never been a better time to work together to achieve real World Class standards and in West London we are taking this challenge very seriously. We will be launching a range of progression agreements in the New Year to increase the numbers of vocational learners entering Higher Education.

Graeme Hall, formerly Chief Executive of UK Skills and now Executive Director of the West London Lifelong Learning Network.

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