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Team Canada’s 29 competitors gear up for WorldSkills Competition in JapanGoing for the GoldThe skilled trades and the youths worldwide who are its superstars will strut their stuff at the 39th WorldSkills Competition in Shizuoka, Japan, this November. |
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 [ 2007-05-16 ] |
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L-R: Andrew Kramer, Chris Rintjema, Stuart Haws and Peter Mullen qualified to join the Skills Canada Team by programing robots to pick up and dump footballs into a hoop.
A sort of Olympics of the skilled trades, the biennial international event attracts hundreds of skilled young people from more than 45 countries/regions, along with their teachers and trainers, to compete before the public in 48 different trades competitions. Welding, bricklaying, floristry, dressmaking, web design and restaurant services are just some of the categories in which participants will get a chance to show off the skills they’ve honed through years of training throughout high school.
The objective of WorldSkills is to promote global awareness of the skilled trades as important contributors to national economies as well as individual fulfilment.
Among Team Canada’s 29 competitors are four Ontario students, including Alex Heaman, who’ll compete in the Autobody Repair category.
“I’m extremely excited, but it hasn’t hit me yet, it still feels like a dream,” says Heaman, 17, who attends Robert Bateman High School in Burlington.
Eureka moment
Four years ago, when Heaman discovered auto body repair in Grade 9, he had a Eureka moment: he instantly fell for the trade and knew what he wanted to do professionally.
“I really liked the idea of using big tools and welding using fire. I also had an amazing teacher,” Heaman says.
Last year, he won gold in auto body repair at the national Skills Canada competition, which qualified him to compete at WorldSkills.
“It blew me away that I actually won,” he enthuses. “I put a lot of time and effort beforehand into training and had a lot of late nights preparing with my teacher, and it paid off.”
Since winning, he’s been preparing even more to ensure he’s in fine form when he reaches Japan. He’s using part of his $5,000 training grant from Skills Canada to fly to two U.S. auto machinery shops to exercise his skills on the latest auto framing machines.
He knows generally which auto repairs he’ll be performing in Japan, and that the test car will be a Lexus IS 250 — the rest he’ll find out just a few days before the competition.
But he’s confident he’s got the know-how to take on any task, and no matter what happens, he’s thrilled to be able to list these valuable training experiences on his resumé.
“WorldSkills shows students about what happens when you work hard and put 100% of your effort and time into something,” says Heaman, who’s currently working as a bodywork assistant at City/HMP Autobody in Hamilton, and plans to pursue his auto body technician certification upon finishing high school. “It shows that the trades aren’t a dead-end, that you need a lot of smarts to work in the trades and you can have a great career.”
Chris Rintjema is equally as excited about going to WorldSkills, especially because he’ll be competing in the event’s first ever Mobile Robotics competition.
The 18-year-old former Grimsby Secondary School student qualified to join the Skills Canada Team by winning an event in which he and three teammates had to program robots to pick up and dump footballs into a hoop.
He’ll have to work a lot harder in Japan, however: the competition will involve programming a robot to perform several different tasks, such as moving across a straight line or following a ball.
“I’m excited to go, but I’m a little nervous — we still have a lot of work to do to prepare,” Rintjema says.
Currently a first-year University of Waterloo computer engineering student, Rintjema is training a couple of nights a week, and come summer break he’ll be at it full force. He’s using a model of the test robot provided by Festo Didactic automation systems company, the competition’s sponsor, to practise.
“This competition gives students a one-of-a-kind opportunity to see what their skills can actually accomplish,” Rintjema says.
“It shows the practical use to many skills learned through hands-on work as opposed to just academic training.”
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