Xie Huixuan Talks about the World Skills Competition: Skills Are a Common Language for East-West Exchange

The 48th World Skills Competition was held in Shanghai from September 22 to 27. Xie Huixuan from China once won the gold medal in the Industry 4.0 event together with his partner at the 47th WorldSkills, held in Lyon, France in 2024, and also took home the only “Albert Vidal Award” of the entire competition. Now, in his new role as a Skills Dream Ambassador and a member of the national training team coaching staff, he is taking part in the Shanghai WorldSkills Competition, sharing his competition experience and training insights. Xie Huixuan said that, having changed from a competitor to a host, he feels more at ease mentally and can focus more of his energy on promotion and coaching. He recalled that China started relatively late in the Industry 4.0 event and initially relied mainly on selfstudy through publicly released competition tasks and highintensity training. Through longterm refinement, precompetition adaptation, and teamwork, it gradually built its own competition preparation system. When talking about exchanges between China and other countries, Xie Huixuan believes that skills themselves are a kind of “common language.” Under the same competition tasks and unified standards, contestants from different countries and regions can communicate around technical issues and understand one another. For young people, he suggests choosing a skill direction they are truly interested in and maintaining persistence, patience, and learning ability; when facing the development of artificial intelligence, they should actively embrace and make good use of tools while still holding on to solid fundamental skills.