Students are like trees; they need to be watered and nurtured to grow and have equal opportunities, says Didimalo Sereo following his participation at the World Skills Competition 2022 Special Edition (WSC2022SE) in Goyang, Korea, in October 2022. 

The 23-year-old, fondly known as Gift, competed in the Information Technology (IT) Network Systems Administration category against other youth, including front runners such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and other developed and emerging countries. 

The WSC2022SE saw the participation of 133 competitors from 34 countries as part of the international competition series, which started in September and ran until the end of November 2022. 

World Skills is the world’s largest skill championship, involving over 1,000 competitors in 16 host countries and 26 cities. 

The IT Network Systems Administration was one of eight skills categories. The other categories were mobile applications development, IT software solutions for business, web technologies, plastic die engineering, digital game art, cloud computing and cyber security. 

Gift explains that the four-day competition focused on different projects, starting with a server-related project, moving to networking, programming and automation, and ending with a secret challenge designed by an appointed industry expert on the aspects of IT network systems administration. 

“The standard was high but I have learnt a lot from the experience,” commenting on his WorldSkills participation.

Gift’s WorldSkills journey started in his final year at the Vuselela Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) College, where he was completing his National Certificate Vocational: Information Technology Certificate. He went on to win the WorldSkills SA (WSZA) competition in North West in 2021. 

“Representing the province at the national competition gave me a sense of pride, and winning gold was a major achievement,” he says about the WSZA national competition held in June 2022. 

“But the Goyang experience was an honour because I was also representing Africa because South Africa was the only African country participating in the international competition.”

“Besides the technical exposure, I learnt a lot from seeing the importance of being accountable to myself to manage time better towards achieving my goals. This was a real eye-opener, and I plan to improve my skills.”

What stood out for Gift in the international competition was the level of support young people receive from other countries for artisan skills in the fast-paced IT environment. 

“For most competing countries, different stakeholders involved in putting resources over many years to skill thousands of young people for the job market, beyond the competition.” 

Gift says, “there’s a desperate need to nurture, give exposure and grow not just me, but many more young people if our nation is able to gain some competitive advantage on the international stage and improve the country.”

Gift explains that in preparing for the Goyang competition, Mbusi Makhanya, a WSZA national expert, went beyond his role as a mentor. 

“I wish I had more time with him before the competition, but he assisted me a lot with online classes and helped to keep my head right during the competition,” he says.  

The Goyang contestants were supported by 127 experts, including Makhanya and Shailendra Sasti, from Elangeni TVET College in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). Makhanya and Sasti are WSZA national experts appointed by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). 

Makhanya is a Cisco Certified trainer with extensive teaching and learning experience and is an IT lecturer. He was a local college expert and played an instrumental role in rallying other colleges in forming the KZN structure which assists with the artisan pipeline development activities for the competition. 

“I was appointed provincial expert to organise and run competitions, which we successfully did in the lead up to [the World Skills] Russia, Sochi 2019 competitions,” says Mbusi.

He explains that his experience and exposure to the competition from the grassroots to the international stage saw him being appointed a national expert earlier this year and was assigned to mentor Gift for the IT Network Systems Administrator 2022 competition. 

He says that an IT network systems administrator works in diverse environments including network operations centres, internet service providers, data centres, for example, Amazon and climate-controlled server rooms. A person in this role offers a wide range of services based on user support, troubleshooting, design, installation and upgrading, and configuring operating systems and network devices to support a company’s operations.

Makhanya says that the biggest takeaways from Goyang 2022 would be the level of professionalism, dedication and commitment of the experts from different countries to artisan development. 

“How they model, train and structure themselves within their countries for success at the international level was a huge takeaway which would be critical for South Africa’s participation in future competitions,” he says. 

To future South African hopefuls in IT network systems administration, Makhanya says you need “preparation and a fixed training regime that is structured with the guidance of a skilled expert as early as possible to move from studying networking to training so that your skills are world-class and meet the industry’s requirements.”

Another South African competitor at WSC2022SE was Diveshen Naicker, 22, who competed in the IT Software Solution for Business category. 

Naicker registered for the WorldSkills competition while studying NCV: IT and Computer Science at the Elangeni TVET College Pinetown Campus. He graduated with his NCV qualification and studies IT at the Durban University of Technology.

The WSC2022SE IT Network Systems Administration gold was awarded to Korea and Japan and a Bronze to Chinese Taipei. Winners in IT Software Solution for Business were Japan and Korea with a gold and a bronze awarded to Chinese Taipei. 

Thirty-one young South Africans represented SA in this year’s competitions under WSZA. The WSC2022SE marked the 46th time the event has taken place.

WSZA is championed by the DHET and funded by the National Skills Fund. DHET hosts provincial and national WSZA competitions and facilitates the participation of South Africa in the bi-annual WorldSkills international competitions as a mechanism for promoting artisan skills as a viable career choice and forming partnerships with the industry. 

Picture: Mentor and mentee, Mbusi Makhanya and Didimalo ‘Gift’ Sereo, during an interval at the World Skills contest in Goyang, Korea

The article was written by Khanyisa Ngewu, NSF Director: Public Relations and Communication, and first published in the TVET College Times December 2022 edition