The efforts made by our gold sponsor Kemppi in the Welding skill are paying off: the preparations for the Welding skill are almost complete thanks to the commitment of the Finnish company and the support of several Austrian businesses and the vocational college LBS Mureck.

Thanks to many helping hands and supportive companies, the preparations for the Welding competition skill are already on the home stretch. In cooperation with the companies Gigerl & Kollmann, Willingshofer, HABAU and Kemper, EuroSkills workshop manager Norbert Pfleger, from our gold sponsor Kemppi, has done everything necessary to ensure that the welding booths required for AustrianSkills and EuroSkills 2020 have been pre-assembled and prepared for transport. We are also grateful to the vocational college in Mureck, where we were allowed to pre-assemble the booths, and to its director Margarethe Edelsbrunner and her team, who used their best endeavours to support the cause.

The assembly team consisted of Norbert Pfleger, Reinhard and Paul Puntigam, EuroSkills 2018 participant Thomas Käferböck, Gerhard Zechner and former WorldSkills competitor and bronze medal winner Martin Schwaiger. Over five working days, the team pre-assembled the welding booths in 2-metre and 1-metre segments to facilitate transport to the AustrianSkills event in November and to EuroSkills 2020 in January. As well as the walls, work was also needed for the required welding benches. These benches are being manufactured thanks to the support provided by companies such as M&E Werkzeugservice (Koglhof) and voestalpine (Krieglach), as well as by Weissenbacher (St. Barbara), which applied the coating free of charge.

The cost for the welding booths alone normally amounts to around EUR 28,000, not including the cost of the welding benches. The price for one bench is approximately EUR 1,500, and the containers needed for transport cost approximately 3,000 euros each. The above costs were paid by the companies Kemppi, Gigerl&Kollmann, Kemper, Willingshofer, HABAU, voestalpine and EKRO. The generous support from these companies shows once again that events such as EuroSkills 2020 are something special, for which many people go to a great deal of effort behind the scenes to play their part.

We would like to thank everybody who has supported EuroSkills so vigorously and, in so doing, are helping to bring the event to fruition. We are Skills!

Photos Gallery: EuroSkills 2020/Norbert Pfleger.