John Hok dot Com

Well I was away the week of June 6th to June 10th because I had to attend a national competition called Skills Canada. Skills Canada is a competition designed to bring the best and the brightest in the skilled trades industry. It is used as a means to attract and promote the skilled trades in Canada because that is something our country supposedly needs.

The competition is setup so that there is first a provincial qualifying round and the gold medalist from there moves onto the national competition. There are probably over 40 categories in the skilled trades that people could enter in. These range from culinary arts to electronics. I entered under the “Web Development” competition and I won gold for the provincial qualifying round so I got to go to the national competition being held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan this year.

It was an experience I probably will never forget. First time entering, first individual ever from my high school to enter, and I won the gold medal as well on the national level! I was pretty shocked and surprised because I didn’t really think what I did held up with the competition. The competition itself was an experience. To see how much pride each province had in its members. The cheering and the competitiveness atmosphere was amazing. Also being around people just like you and understand really technical things was really nice for a change.

Throughout the competition they planned different events and entertainment to keep our minds clear from the hard days of work. My competition we had about 14 hours of work spread across 2 days and we were responsible for redesigning an existing site so that it conforms to programming standards. Also to develop an aesthetically pleasing design.

I’m still waiting to get my judging breakdown, so hopefully they will send it. I’m really interested in knowing how they judged my work and it would really give me some good insight on what I could improve on. The bad thing though is they don’t always give the judging breakdown so I’m kind of doubtful.

What happens after this? Well nothing really. I unfortunately found out that every 2 years the Skills Canada competition is used as a qualifying for the World Skills competition. So if I entered a year earlier and won, I would’ve advanced onto the World Skills this year being held in Japan! I did miss out on that but hey, I had an awesome time at Skills Canada nonetheless. Making it that far was more than what I could have ever asked for. And having a medal to prove that your the best web developer for high school students in your nation is quite something in my books.

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