Twenty- year-old former student Lewis Bourne won gold at WorldSkills UK – the country’s leading skills competition - when he beat all comers in the Cisco IT Technician competition at the Skills Show at the NEC.
Lewis excelled in a gruelling two full days of testing in front of thousands of visitors to the show – but despite the distractions he kept his cool and produced outstanding results to become national champion.
Lewis, who works as an apprentice with CRC's IT training agency Smart Computing, was absolutely delighted at the win.
“I thought the other competitors had done better then me so I was very surprised – but ecstatic - when they announced that I had won gold,” he said.
“It was very stressful, but my tutors, Pete Lawrence and Ted Deacon, worked hard with me to prepare for the competition and that helped enormously.”
It was the first time a CRC student had represented the college in computing, and Lewis could now go on to become part of the UK team for the international WorldSkills competition in Brazil.
IT lecturer Pete Lawrence said the standard of the competitors had been incredibly high.
“Lewis was competing against the best in the country but he held his nerves, did not panic and maintained a positive focus on the tasks at hand. He performed outstandingly well,” he said.
“We practised many elements of the competition in the evenings and weekends leading up to the event and we are absolutely delighted that he won gold. The whole college is very proud of him.”
Lewis has now been invited to compete for a place in the national WorldSkills team, where he could win the chance to represent the country at WorldSkills 2015 in Sao Paulo.
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