Electrician instructor, Ron Stocks, has been involved with World Skills competitions since 2007, and he was recently invited to share his expertise at the World Skills Columbia event in Barranquilla, Colombia. 
"This event is a national-level competition, and its purpose is to assist in selecting competitors that may go to World Skills Abu Dhabi in 2017," Stocks says. "I was one of 22 international experts invited by the National Service of Learning in Colombia to contribute and share knowledge about World Skills competitions."
Stocks was in Colombia for seven days, with the first two days spent working with local experts in the evaluation and judging of test projects. "Each Trade or Skills Competition Event has a marking scheme that the judges use to mark the student's projects," he says. "I worked with the Colombian experts to translate these and clarify the judging criteria, based on the World Skills Sao Paulo 2015 competition."
In addition to this pre-event work and his contributions refining the electrical test project to match the equipment on-site, Stocks also gave a presentation about World Skills to faculty and students at the competition. "When I considered the bigger theme of my presentation, I chose to focus on the connection between World Skills and life skills, with an emphasis on doing your best on any given day, no matter what your circumstances may be," he says.
With 15 years of experience as an instructor at RDC, Stocks shares these positive messages, as well as his learnings from his extensive work with Skills competitions with his students. Stocks has been involved with Skills Canada Alberta and the Skills Compétences Canada National Competitions since 2003. He has also participated in World Skills competitions in Japan, Canada, England, Germany and Brazil, as well as two other international events in Taiwan.
"I've been able to have these experiences because of the support of my deans and senior administration at RDC," Stocks says. "It's been incredibly meaningful to me to meet people from all over the world, to develop friendships and exchange knowledge with them and to see how things are done in other countries." Through World Skills competitions, Stocks has learned about some of the newest technologies, and he then brings this information back to apprenticeship students, giving them an idea of what they will likely be working with in the near future.
"Building relationships on a global scale, as Ron has been doing for many years, has such a positive impact on students, faculty and all of Red Deer College," says Joel Gingrich, Dean, School of Trades and Technologies. "Whenever we have the opportunity to learn from and share knowledge with other institutions and industry professionals, it advances the work that we do with apprenticeship students in Red Deer."
