Virtual Skills Week 2021

Proudly supported by

Get ready to show off your digital determination and put your hard-earned skills in web design, cyber security, cloud computing or IT Network Systems Admin to the test!

WorldSkills Australia has partnered with AWS, Keysight Technologies and CloudShare to create Virtual Skills Week 2021 – where Australia’s top up-and-coming IT talent will battle for medals, prizes and a potential spot at the WorldSkills Australia National Championships.

Registrations are now open – click the icons below to register, or scroll down to read more about what to expect at Virtual Skills Week 2021, and whether you’re eligible.

Why should I enter?

Taking part in Regional Competitions offers participants huge benefits and opportunities. These include:

  • Striving and being recognised for excellence
  • Boosting your workplace skills and performance
  • Demonstrating your potential to current and future employers
  • Benchmarking your skills against others in your field
  • Fast-tracking your career and developing skills such as time management and organisation skills
  • Building your networking and communication skills through taking direction from industry peers, engaging with industry and peers and working alongside rivals
  • Developing your commitment and responsibility through understanding and meeting competition criteria and requirements.

Am I eligible to enter?

To enter the Virtual Skills Week Competitions, applicants should

  • Be undertaking studies towards a qualification at an RTO/TAFE/University
  • Undertaken/recently completed qualification at an RTO/TAFE/University
Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

AWS Academy and AWS Educate are pleased to be supporting the WorldSkills Australia and New Zealand Cloud Skill Regional Event for 2021, to give you the opportunity to demonstrate and improve your cloud skills in a fun environment.

The competition environment is a series of capture the flag challenges. Each challenge is worth a number of points that are awarded when the challenge is solved. Each challenge also includes hints, but using these hints reduces the number of points you may receive for that challenge.

The event is completely virtual, so you will need

  • A computer running Windows, MacOSX or Linux
  • A modern browser, preferably Chrome or Firefox
  • A microphone or headset
  • An internet connection

Students attending the cloud skill event will be asked to register on the AWS Jam platform and an initial welcome and demonstration of the platform will be streamed on Twitch.

The AWS JAM is an event where students experience a wide range of AWS services in a series of prepared scenarios that represent common use-cases and operational tasks, such as remediation at scale, automation, forensics, incident response, AI/ ML, DevOps, compliance and many others. The event is gamified, with students competing to score points by completing a series of challenges over the course of the event. AWS provides access to pre-created infrastructure that is based on common use cases that students use to determine what happened, how to best respond, and deploy appropriate solutions. The challenges have varying degrees of difficulty and points associated with them. A live leader-board provides updates on stats and progress. Clues and guidance help your students move through the challenges.

The challenges that have been selected use or more of these services: EC2, Lambda, S3, SSM,  IAM, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, RDS, SQS, SNS, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, DynamoDB, API Gateway, KMS and others. AWS Jam is designed as a learning platform, so students will encounter services and problems they have never seen before. They are permitted to access public documentation during the event and encouraged to use the hints if they are stuck.

Students need a computer with a current version of Chrome or Firefox and internet access with unrestricted access on ports 80 and 443. We have avoided challenges that require SSH access.

The event is supported AWS staff, and educators at participating institutions will also be given a tour of the AWS Jam platform during the event.

Questions?

Please contact: David Chatterton dcchatte@amazon.com

Cyber Security

Cyber Security

Keysight Technologies are pleased to be supporting the WorldSkills Australia and New Zealand Cyber Security Skill Regional Event for 2021

This competition is a team event –  with a red and a blue member. This unique competition environment gives the participants the chance to understand, learn and analyse the different kind of Attack and Defence techniques by active playing the role of RED (Attacker) and BLUE (Defender) and in doing so find different kinds of flags based on different difficulty and earn points. [Switching roles between red/blue team member in the same team is allowed].

 

Knowing both the Attack/Defence methods and getting in that mindset ultimately prepares the participants for the real world where, there are lot of variables and unknown and they need to protect their network and assets against any network and cyber security threats possible.

Every team will be given jump machine and the details on how to access the Jump machine will be communicated once registered.

Tools for the Red and Blue Members would include:

  1. Kali Linux
  2. Target machines
  3. Next Generation Firewall
  4. SIEM – Monitoring Tool
  5. Realtime Scoring System

Questions?

Please contact: Mateen Padela mateen.padela@keysight.com

IT Network Systems Admin

Keysight Technologies and Cloudshare are pleased to be supporting the WorldSkills Australia IT Network Systems Administration Skill Regional Event for 2021

The WorldSkills Australia IT Network Systems Administration competitions are aligned to the ICT Information and Communications Technology Training Package.

The competition requires the competitors to create a network representing a small-to-medium enterprise using a virtual environment, each competitor will be tested in a variety of different areas including:

  • Configuration of a hypervisor
  • Installation and configuration of Windows hosts
  • Installation and configuration of Linux hosts
  • IP addressing and associated services
  • Configuration of network services and resources
  • Security policies
  • User accounts and access control
  • Documentation

 

Questions?

Please contact: Troy Pretty itnsa@outlook.com.au

Web Design

AWS Academy and AWS Educate are pleased to be supporting the WorldSkills Australia Web Design & Development Skill Regional Event for 2021.

Web Design and Development encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites and involves implementing specific solutions that follow the business rules and objectives outlined by the client.

The WorldSkills Australia Web Design and Development competitions are aligned to the ICT Information and Communications Technology Training Package and Regional Competition and the competition will be focused on the design, client-side development, functional development, interactivity

Skills may include:

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • PHP
  • Databases (MYSQL)
  • JavaScript

Do I need an AWS Account?

No, the competition environment allocates accounts to participants on the day.

Questions

Please contact mitchell.larosa@gmail.com

 image

What is WorldSkills Australia?

WorldSkills Australia influences, challenges and supports Australians to develop, recognise and promote skills excellence for a thriving economy.

We promote and build a skills culture, celebrate excellence and showcase vocational education and training. We achieve this by engaging in research, promoting skills, building careers, focusing on education and skills training in Australia, fostering international cooperation and development, and running skills competitions and leadership programs.

Successful competitors have the opportunity to progress to a number of career-boosting pathways. In addition to potentially competing for Gold, Silver and Bronze medals in their chosen skill nationally, and even internationally as members of the Skillaroos – the WorldSkills Australia International Team – there are leadership programs and scholarships to enable young people to become the very best versions of themselves.