Regarded as the world's largest and most influential vocational skills competition, the 48th WorldSkills Competition brings together 1,385 young professionals from 68 countries and regions in Shanghai from Sept 22 to 27 to showcase a wide range of vocational skills.

The competition is primarily for young skilled professionals, with competitors completing around six hours of practical work each day. They carry out hands-on tasks and demonstrate their skills under competitive conditions.

Seven new skills have been introduced to the competition this year: software testing, intelligent security technology, rail vehicle technology, unmanned aerial systems, digital interactive media design, dental prosthetics, and retail sales.

While dentists handle clinical diagnosis and treatment, dental technicians use oral scan data to focus on the precise, customized creation of prosthetics such as dentures, crowns, and veneers, without being involved in frontline clinical work, explained Zhou Manli, head coach of the Shanghai team for the new event and director of the Prosthetics department at Xuhui District Dental Hospital.

"This competition demands extreme precision — an error of just 0.2 millimeters can affect how well a prosthetic fits and ultimately the final score," she said. "Dental prosthetics combines knowledge from medicine, aesthetics, and other fields, representing a mix of technical skills and craftsmanship."

The standardized WorldSkills competition system will help establish international standards for the industry, helping the traditional dental prosthetics field move away from rough manual work and accelerate its shift toward digital, standardized, and highly precise practices.

Based on the development of the global rail transit industry and the gap in skilled talent, the 48th WorldSkills Competition has also added rail vehicle technology as a new event.

This event fully adopts Chinese standards, filling the gap in the WorldSkills Competition’s offerings for rail transit vehicles and providing a professional platform for the training, exchange, and evaluation of skilled professionals in the global rail transit industry, according to Yang Danhao, a coach for the event and teacher at Shanghai Communications Polytechnic.

China’s urban railway transit network now has a total operating mileage of more than 11,000 kilometers, the longest in the world. This extensive network and the industry it supports generate substantial demand for skilled professionals, according to Huang Kaili, another coach for the rail vehicle technology competition and a teacher at Shanghai Communications Polytechnic.

"The competition is not about driving trains," Yang added. "The competition plan is based on the maintenance and upkeep of rail transportation. The focus is on troubleshooting and maintenance of the trains."

Source: China Daily