On May 22, the Rail Transit Signal Control System Design and Application Competition of the 2021-2022 Guangdong Vocational College Skills Competition was held online. Two teams of the Urban Rail major from the School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering won the first prize in Guangdong Province. The leaders of the School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering attached great importance to the training and preparation for the skills competition by, from the macro level of overall planning to the micro level of service, integrating the competition and education for talent training, added with humanistic care, so that the teachers and students could face the tense preparation with full enthusiasm, and participate in the competition with a light heart. This is the expression of ideological and political construction for students, and also the achievement of ethics construction for teachers at the school.

In the five years since this competition was launched, the Urban Rail major has won the first prize for five consecutive times. Under the guidance of the team leader Cui Hongwei, the deputy dean of the school, and after several rounds of preparation, the teacher team led by the director Hu Songhua thoroughly implemented the school’s talent training program of integrating competition and education, and established a sound preparation scheme:

First, build an echelon of existing teachers providing guidance for new teachers. New teachers would be involved in the preparation after three steps of “following, learning and assisting”, and through one year of involvement, could undertake the tasks of key instructors. After several rounds of echelon building so far, the Urban Rail major has formed an outstanding Party member team capable to assume important missions.

Second, incubate skills elites based on community. The Urban Rail major, community-centered, interest-driven, and under the requirement of independent thinking and insistence on innovation, has incubated teams for signal, vehicle, driver and operation skills competitions over the past few years, truly implementing the OBE talent training concept of “student-centered, output-oriented” and stimulating the initiative of students.

Third, convert competition resources to teaching. The competition module, after three steps of “analysis” (competition resources), “conversion” (teaching resources) and “implementation” (project teaching) by team teachers, is decomposed into competition skills for reconstruction of teaching tasks to avoid three drawbacks, i.e. the skills competition becoming “elite education”, teaching and competition as “two skins”, and uneven distribution of education resources. Through the skills competition, the teacher team of the Urban Rail major is committed to transforming elite education into universal education for talent training.

The result of this competition is the phased achievement of the research and practice of integrating competition and education. In the face of the two major challenges of the online competition, namely the significant adjustment of the test questions and the preparation time of only one week, the participating teachers and students demonstrated solid preparation skills. On the boat of vocational education innovation and development at SZPT, with teachers’ morality and skills as the engine, students calmly participated in the competition and finally won the prize.

(Zhou Lili, School of Automotive and Transportation Engineering)