Like our world, skills never stand still. Advances in technology and the growth of new industries, call for a talented and well educated workforce that meets these demands.

WorldSkills is committed to remain at the heart of these changes. That means constantly reviewing and evolving the list of skills supported at the WorldSkills Competitions.

Some of these may still be unfamiliar, which is why introducing them to the young people who visit our skills competitions is so important.

All of them play an exciting and important role in building the economies of the future and raising the prosperity and future of families and communities everywhere.

The process of reviewing what skills are included in future competitions takes two years. In the current cycle, this began at in October 2019, with proposals invited fromMembers and Global Partners.

Each skill is then considered by an advisory group, called Skills In Skills Out – who consider skills that will be dropped and added from the Competition - with their conclusions announced to Members so they can consider participation in the skills.

After six months, a process called pre-provisional registration establishes if there will likely be enough Competitors for both existing and new proposed skills.

Then 12 months before the Competition pre-provisional registration is closed and the skills for the next Competition, WorldSkills Shanghai 2022, are confirmed.

It’s a cycle that will begin again in 2022, ensuring every WorldSkills Competition reflects the ever-changing world of work and drives vocational and technical education everywhere to stay relevant.

For WorldSkills Shanghai 2022, we will see no less than nine new skills. They are:
Additive Manufacturing
Building Information Modelling
Industrial Design Technology
Industry 4.0
Mobile Applications Development
Optoelectronic Technology
Rail Vehicle Technology
Renewable Energy
Robot Systems Integration

A full description of each of these skills can be found on our website, but to give a flavor of what some involve, they include creating the apps we use everyday on our phones, building complex prototypes for new products using 3D printing, and, of course, developing new sources of energy that will help solve our climate crisis.
Here is the future, and WorldSkills is excited to bring it ever closer at WorldSkills Shanghai 2022 next year.