Austria
Since 1950 the WorldSkills competitions strive to find the best young talents from all around the world across professions and skills. This year, competitions took place in 15 countries. More than 1100 young people from 57 countries participated in one of the 61 different competitions ranging from "Welding" to "Hotel Reception". Our TUI colleague Adrian Rasokat competed in the category "Cloud Computing” and is now Vice World Champion!
Adrian started his IT career at TUI as an apprentice in 2016 and works now as Platform Engineer in the Developer Experience Team. His job at TUI requires cloud computing skills. But even with his experience, Adrian started to prepare early for the competition tasks and formats.
“It is great to be able to compete internationally with skills that I need for my job! The competition showed to me that TUI is at the forefront of IT skills and practices. TUI is truly a great place to grow – especially for young IT professionals that want to develop their skills,” says Adrian Rasokat.
On 8 October 2022, Adrian started his journey to Goyang, South Korea, together with the German delegation. Member of this delegation was another TUI colleague: Simon Stamm works also as Senior Platform Engineer in the Developer Experience Team and volunteers as “Expert” – comparable to the coach of a soccer team – in the area of Could Computing for the WorldSkills competition in Germany. In this role, Simon organizes national competitions, trains candidates and supports the organisation of the competition.
The competition took place over four days from 13 to 16 October 2022. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the current WorkSkills industry partner for the skill "Cloud Computing“. That means they design the test projects and judgement characteristics that competitors are tested on. For the first two days AWS prepared two day-long AWS GameDay scenarios that tested the competitors in their skill of real-world cloud infrastructure deployment. The judgement criteria where based on the AWS Well-Architected Framework Pillars Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization and Sustainability. Because these are all best-practices that we adhere to at TUI, Adrian could make good use of his work experience.
On the third and fourth day the competitors had to complete nine AWS Jam challenges each day. These challenges included technical topics from networking to machine learning and tested the knowledge spectrum of the competitors. Finally the results were presented at the Closing Ceremony on 17 October. Adrian secured the second place for Germany. It's the first silver medal in IT skills for Germany since 2003.
A WorldSkills competition usually takes place every two years. Every country can send one competitor (two for some team-based skills) to each competition. The goal of these competitions is not only to determine who is the best, but to inspire new generations of apprentices, students and young professionals and to develop their skills.
