I won the Worldskills Gold Medal!

Back in march I signed up for an an engineering competition that just ‘sounded fun’ I thought. It’d just be my colleage Arun and I taking part on competition where we would have to assemble an electro-pneumatic system under a specific time limit. That simple decision singlehandedly took us through months of preparation followed by an unforgetable trek to Manchester where we met a lot of friends and gained invaluable experience along the way.

Where to begin… First was the technical stuff we learned. We came in knowing absolutely nothing about PLC programming, a vital skill (get it?) needed for this compeitition. We went from knowing nothing about it to heading 1st in the regional rounds within only 1 month. But that was far from the end because right after a well deserved break we kept training twice as hard from September all the way until the national finals in November. During this period we also learned Node-RED for industry 4.0 on top of intensive training on past Automation tasks.

Then there was the friends we made along the way. We met a lot of great people. The ones you see in this picture were the Automation team from Burnley: Igor and Keiran. Both of them were fellow engineers Arun and I met. Aside from competing our times outside of that were amazing. We shared sauna, pool, hotel and lots of great conversation. To this day I still remain in good contact with them. The competition may have stopped but our spirit never did. We still share stories and details about the latest projects we do as well as life in general 😁.

We also met many other great people that would make a VERY long list.