Vocational skills competition gets underway

Eleven new skills competition events, including additive manufacturing, robot system integration, and network system management, have been added to the two-day Ninth Shanghai Vocational Students Skills Competition which starts on May 8 at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum.

Other newly added events are mobile application development, e-commerce, new energy vehicles, Python programming, sugar art, freight forwarder, building information modeling, chemical laboratory technology.

A part of the Star Plan project, which was launched in 2004 by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, the Shanghai Education Development Foundation, and the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau to promote vocational education, the competition is made up of secondary and high school groups.

The secondary vocational group has 66 competition events, with more than 66,000 students from 67 schools participating in the preliminary competition and 2,776 students entering the final.

The high school group has 34 events, with more than 14,000 students participating in the preliminary competition and 1,169 entering the final.

Among these events, 29 from the secondary school group and 24 from the high school group are geared toward the World Skills Competition.

In addition, over 150 students from 41 vocational schools competed in six events, including health and social care, floristry and abacus at the main venue at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum during the weekend.