EuroSkills experts Bryn and Geraint gearing up for WorldSkills 2026
The Coleg Menai lecturers were judges in Europe’s most prestigious skills competition recently, and will reprise their roles for next year’s ‘Skills Olympics’
Coleg Menai engineering lecturers Geraint Rowlands and Bryn Jones are preparing for WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 following their experience as judges at EuroSkills.
Geraint and Bryn will be in China next year as the WorldSkills UK training managers for electronics and additive manufacturing respectively.
Over the coming months they will train and assess the candidates in their respective disciplines, before each selecting one competitor to represent the UK in the ‘Skills Olympics’ (September 22 to 27).
In Shanghai, Geraint and Bryn will also serve as experts on the judging panels for their disciplines, having done the same in this month’s Euroskills 2025 competition in Denmark.
Around 600 young people from all over Europe competed across 38 skills in Herning, watched by 103,000 visitors - including UK skills minister Jacqui Smith and even the King of Denmark.
“It really is like the Olympics,” said Bryn, who was also an expert at last year’s WorldSkills competition in Lyon. “It’s a very collaborative atmosphere - all the countries working together for the good of the competition. You can tell that ethos from the opening and closing ceremony, with the message that we’re Europe and this is what unites us.”
Although there was no additive manufacturing competition in Herning, Bryn received a last-minute call to help judge the mechanical engineering (computer-aided design) discipline.
Geraint was one of the judges for electronics prototyping, in which Coleg Menai student and WorldSkills hopeful Evan Klimaszewski was competing. Up against competitors with much more experience, Evan didn’t medal but still achieved a higher score than he had in any previous competition or training task.
Geraint said: “Evan outperformed a competitor from Spain who competed in WorldSkills last year. He came out pretty much bouncing and saying ‘I want to get home and get straight back into training and improving my skills so I can do better next time around’.”
As well as assisting with the running of Europe’s biggest skills competition, Geraint and Bryn absorbed ideas to inform their teaching, keeping them ahead of the game in skills education.
Geraint said: “We were working alongside fellow experts in our disciplines from other countries throughout Europe. So it was a good opportunity to find new ideas and approaches and think about how we can integrate them into our teaching at college or our training for skills competitions, with the aim of giving our students the best possible preparation for work and build their skills as high as possible.”
Bryn added: “Skills evolve like any trade. Obviously the standard keeps going up through competition, and when you’re at the end of a competition you discuss with the other experts what changes should be made to that discipline.
“So you’re literally at the very forefront of how the skills evolve. For example we might discuss AI, how that might have repercussions on various skills, how it can be integrated and so on.
“Those changes might feed down to education in three years’ time. But we’re at the tip of those changes, so we can get that message across early to our students - obviously meeting the current requirements of the curriculum, but essentially going beyond it.”
For Evan, EuroSkills was a first taste of international competition as he strives to make the UK team for WorldSkills 2026. The second-year HNC engineering student was selected after winning gold at last year’s WorldSkills UK finals, and is one of two electronics candidates vying for a place on the plane to China.
WorldSkills will be another step up, with many countries training competitors full-time for the biennial showdown.
Geraint said: “WorldSkills gets a lot more cut-throat because there are certain countries who will recruit people straight out of high school to spend five years working full-time and training for a future WorldSkills competition, whereas we in this country do it as a bolt-on to their regular education.
“Evan is putting his head down and making sure he’s doing everything he can to be selected. He definitely has his sights firmly on Shanghai at the moment.”
Bryn says Evan’s involvement in EuroSkills can also inspire his fellow students, adding: “I’ve been showing my students pictures of Evan competing, because he was in their shoes a few years ago. So they understand that it’s accessible, that it could be them, and that sometimes you’ve just got to take an opportunity.”
Want to learn more about the exciting world of engineering? Grŵp Llandrillo Menai offers courses from Level 1 right up to Higher Apprenticeships. Find out more here.