NStrim Is the Platform Behind Web Technologies at WorldSkills Shanghai 2026

WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 opened on 22 September and runs until the 27th, bringing more than 1,400 young professionals from over 70 countries to compete across 64 skills. It is the largest vocational skills competition in the world. NStrim is the official platform behind the Web Technologies skill.

We provide it white-label, which is the normal arrangement at this level: competitors see the competition's own environment, not ours. It is the least visible work we do and, by some distance, the least forgiving.

What an international final demands

A national competition asks you to give thirty people an identical starting line. WorldSkills asks the same of competitors who arrived from seventy countries, trained on different toolchains, in a venue none of them has worked in before, with a medal attached to the outcome and no possibility of a second attempt.

The requirements that follow are unglamorous. Every environment has to be provisioned identically and verifiably. State has to be restorable to a known-good checkpoint between modules, so that a competitor who breaks something is not eliminated by their own environment. Experts need to see the status of every workstation without walking the floor. And all of it has to hold for six days in a hall built for exhibitions rather than for running infrastructure.

That is the same platform a Latvian vocational school will be able to run on its own servers from Q1 2027 — which is rather the point.

From Jelgava to Shanghai

Earlier this year the same system ran the SkillsLatvia web technologies semi-final at Jelgavas tehnikums in January, and the national final on hardware we brought into the Ķīpsala exhibition centre in May. The distance between a semi-final in a Latvian technical college and the Web Technologies skill at WorldSkills is enormous in every respect except the infrastructure, where it is close to nil.

We think that is the strongest argument for what we are doing next. From Q1 2027 the platform becomes open source for educational use, competition mode and live invigilation included, so that a school or a national organiser can run the same thing we are running in Shanghai this week. You provide the infrastructure. We provide the solution.

The Web Technologies competition concludes on 27 September. If you are organising a competition at any level, talk to us.