UrBC, Yekaterinburg, December 25, 2019. OOO FORES’s Asbest branch coordinated a job skills contest for its electrical/gas welders this month; eight employees took part in the competition, FORES’s press service reports.

‘The pre-New-Year job skills contest on December 19 was the first round of the Best in Profession Contest FORES holds this year. Asbest Polytechnic acted as the plant’s partner in the organization of the event,’ the press service says.

‘The goal is to show that job skills are still quite necessary and valuable. These contests help bring back the respect for blue-collar jobs that seems to have lost its significance a bit lately,’ says Director at FORES’s Asbest branch Dmitri Viberg.

According to the company representatives, there were two rounds to the contest, the theoretical and the practical one. In the theoretical part, the contestants had to do a quiz on engineering graphics, electromechanics, safety rules, welding equipment, and welding technologies. They had thirty minutes to answer thirty questions, so decisions had to be made quickly, just like in the actual work process. In the practical part, the quality and speed of the actual welding process served as the main evaluation criteria.