On the winners’ podium at the SwissSkills professional championships

With Mario Liechti (gold) and Melvin Deubelbeiss (bronze) two of our electronics apprentices achieved a place on the winners’ podium at the SwissSkills 2020. The SwissSkills are the Swiss professional championships organized by the leading industry associations. The final competition took place October 27 - 30, 2020 at Schindler Elevators in Ebikon.

In addition to the two medal winners, Noah Piqué and David Steinacher were very successful, ranking 8 and 9 out of initially 50 participants of the first round and 12 in the final. The 12 finalists were competing for three and a half days in the disciplines HW-Design & Assembling, Measurement & Fault Finding and Embedded System Programming.

The Swiss title qualifies Mario Liechti for participation in the WorldSkills, which will be postponed to 2022 because of the pandemic. Mario finished his four years of electronics apprenticeship this summer and is currently supporting with his work the muon-experiments at the Laboratory for Particle Physics and ferroelectric material investigations at the Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Experiments. In addition, he also supports the instructors in electronics vocational training in the development of new training modules and taking on individual training blocks.   

Melvin Deubelbeiss and Noah Piqué are in their third years of the vocational training. Both are also involved in projects at the Laboratory for Particle Physics. Melvin contributes to developments for the CMS-inner tracker pixel detector and Noah is working for the active magnetic field compensation for the nEDM-Project. David Steinacher is in his fourth year and working at GFA on an RF-system for SwissFEL.

The great success of our apprentices is an impressive proof of their individual performance and of the outstanding engagement of the professional instructors Fredy Albisser and Claudio Kämpf. The vocational training for electronics technicians belongs to the centrally organized PSI Vocational Training and is closely connected to the Electronics for Measuring Systems Group of the Laboratory for Particle Physics within the NUM division.