The WorldSkills Competitions, held every two years, offer the chance for skilled craftsmen and women from all fields (nursing to printing to landscape gardening) to compete and win recognition as the “best” in their field.   44 countries have national competitions to select the contestants who will compete in WorldSkills.
 
The next of these Skills Olympics will be held in Calgary from September 1-7, 2009, and is expected to attract 200 000+ attendees. 14 countries are currently sending competitors for the print competitions.  Naturally, such competitions demand a realistic working environment and a “level playing field” for all contestants.  In the past, all print competitions used real presses which had to be transported, set up, and reset to perfect after each use.
 
This year, in order to allow all contestants more “printing time” and to be able to assess a wider range of skills, the competition will use two Heidelberg presses and five SHOTS Sheetfed Training Simulators from Sinapse Print Simulators. The SHOTS simulator won the prestigious PIA/GATF InterTech award as innovative technology when it was first released, and has now reached a new level of industrial acceptance with its inclusion in the Skills Olympics. While there is nothing new about using simulators to train and evaluate operators (flight simulators, etc), they have now taken their place in the print world.
 
Willem de Zanger, head of the printing section of the WorldSkills competition said, “We feel that by including the SHOTS simulator, we give the contestants a greater chance to demonstrate their abilities, and provide more “printing” time than we could do by only using a press.  In addition, the simulators are less costly to run, quicker to prepare between contests and provide “production costs” that are objective measurements which are the same for all contestants.  We would never want to run the contests using only simulators, but they give us an opportunity to expand our range of competence evaluation.
 
“In addition, we can let visitors try their skills on a “demonstration” version of the simulator, something that would not be possible with a real press.”
 
Peter Herman, President of Sinapse added, “We are pleased to have reached this level of recognition, and both Willem and Heidelberg have made very useful suggestions about additional features which will make the evaluation procedure even more realistic.  We currently have more than 500 Sheetfed simulators installed around the world and
 
expect to double that in the next couple of years.  We look forward to working with WorldSkills Calgary 2009, and possibly taking this further in London in the 2011 WorldSkills event.”