By Jennani Durai

NINETEEN students from the Institute of Technical Education and polytechnics here have produced Team Singapore's best showing yet in an international competition of trade skills.

They returned from the 40th WorldSkills Competition in Calgary, Canada, with three gold medals, a bronze and eight Medallions of Excellence for their performances in their respective categories. Participants faced off across 45 skills categories, ranging from robotics to Web design, restaurant management and nursing.

The medal haul from this biennial 'Olympics of Skills' last month put Singapore in 11th place in a global field of 51.

Another laurel: One of its members beat all 900 participants to emerge as the overall top scorer in the competition.

Nanyang Polytechnic's Tan Thiam Shui, 19, bagged the Albert Vidal award for this. He also won a gold for IT-PC & Network Support, marking a fifth consecutive win in this category for Singapore.

For this gold medal, he performed four days of tasks, which ranged from setting up networks for home environments to networks for security and management.

Singapore's two other golds, also from Nanyang Polytechnic students, came in the Graphic Design Technology and Caring (Nursing) categories.

Nursing students Adeline Mah, 20, and Carolyn Choo, 21, struck gold by showing the judges how they would dress the wounds of a Parkinson's disease patient, handle an asthma attack and prepare a stroke patient for physiotherapy.

The bronze medal came from the Mobile Robotics category, while the Medallions of Excellence were won for, among others, beauty therapy and restaurant management.

As most of the participants went on holiday after the competition, they were given their medals last night by the Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry and for Education S. Iswaran at a gala dinner held at ITE College East.

Referring to Mr Tan's becoming the fifth Singaporean to win top honours in the IT-PC & Network Support category, Mr Marcus Lim, a judge in the local leg of the competition, said: 'After the second win, we thought it was a coincidence, but now, after five straight wins, I think it is because the diploma programmes are tied so closely to what's important in the industry.'

Agreeing, Mr Tan said his training had 'covered everything' and that he hardly had a moment of not knowing what to do.

Mr Iswaran said he hoped Singapore's showing would burnish the reputation of the ITE and polytechnics' technical training in the eyes of the industry.

'Something like this tells us that when you benchmark our students with an international peer group, they are able to not just hold their own, but achieve outstanding results,' he said.

The next WorldSkills competition will be held in London in 2011.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.