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eSim — the working system of WorldSkills Russia

Project completed, 2018–2020

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We developed the system in which the Young Professionals movement ran its championships and demonstration exams: exam centres and their accreditation, expert certificates, participants' skills passports. And we built leaders' dashboards for it, with ratings and analytics for regions and universities.

Client and task

WorldSkills Russia runs championships to WorldSkills standards — regional, qualifying, national finals, corporate, Hi-Tech, university — and demonstration exams at colleges. Participants and experts, quotas, results, exam centres and documents were kept in eSim, an online monitoring system: more than a hundred sections and 28 roles, from participant and expert to the director of a regional coordination centre, competence manager, exam centre and a ministry representative.

In May 2018 the development of eSim, already in operation, passed to us. Every season brought new event formats, documents and rules, and the system had to change without stopping: regions, colleges and experts across the country relied on it. A separate task was leaders' dashboards: regions and universities needed to see their own results and compare them with others without asking the union for data exports.

eSim sign-in page
eSim sign-in page

What we built

eSim came to us up and running. Below is what we added and reworked over two and a half years, plus the leaders' dashboards built from scratch. All people, organisations and scores in the screenshots are fictional.

Demonstration exam skills passport: participant details, exam centre, performance chart by moduleParticipant's account, “Skills passport” tab: the participant's events with passport download links

Skills passport

A participant's document on the result of a demonstration exam or championship: personal details, educational organisation, exam centre and a chart of performance by task module. The passport is built as a PDF from the results, and the participant downloads it in their account for each event.

Proof of qualification is issued with no manual layout, right after the results.

Passport covers: demonstration exam, Hi-Tech 2019, 7th national final, 3rd inter-university final

A template for every event

About 30 passport templates instead of 7 at the start: demonstration exams of 2018–2020, national championship finals in Russian and English, Hi-Tech, DigitalSkills, the 50+ exam, the inter-university championship, BRICS, and a separate passport for participants from China.

Each new event format gets its own document in time for its season.

Exam centre accreditation: filters by region, university and competence, list of exam centresA centre's accreditation by competence: status, code, workstations, expiry date, revocation

Demonstration exam centres

Accreditation of centres by competence — status, code, number of workstations, expiry date — and its revocation, approval of accreditation requests, changing an exam's code, participant data and exam statistics for the union's department.

It is clear which centre may hold an exam in which competence, and until when.

Expert certificate entitling to assess demonstration examsExpiring certificates for a competence manager: experts, certificate numbers and dates

Expert certificates

A certificate entitles an expert to assess a demonstration exam or run championships. We reworked how requests from the WorldSkills Academy come in and get approved, and added certificate renewal, a request archive and a register of expiring certificates for competence managers with an Excel export.

A competence manager sees in advance whose certificate is about to expire.

Regional leader's dashboard: ratings of educational organisations and key figures

Leaders' dashboards

A separate application for heads of regions, companies and universities: ratings of educational organisations by number of events and by medals, key figures, event history and a participant rating.

A leader sees where their region or university stands without asking the union.

Digital footprint of a national final: figures and participants with scores and medalsA participant's result by task module, 100- and 500-point scales, medal

Digital footprint of an event

For each championship or demonstration exam: participants and experts, scores on the 100- and 500-point scales, medals; for a participant, the result by task module on a chart.

A result shows not just the total, but which module of the task went wrong.

Event analytics: competences side by sideCompetence analytics: figures, task modules, participants' scores by module

Analytics by competence

Competences within an event side by side: number of participants, maximum, minimum and average score, the region's best result and its gap to the leader; for a competence, the task modules and each participant's score on them.

A region sees in which competences its participants fall behind, and by how much.

Expert profile: certificates with numbers and events by year

Participant and expert profile

Educational organisation and workplace, certificates with their numbers and all of the person's events by year, championships and exams separately.

An expert's experience and a participant's path are on one page.

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  • New event formats

    The inter-university championship, the 50+ exam, the voluntary qualification exam, the “Independent expert” role, checks of national final participants, participants' mentors, approval of line experts for demonstration exams, forms for CIS — the system where experts enter marks — and medal fixes after results are loaded from it.

    The system kept up with each season's new rules.

  • Reports and mailings

    Excel exports for university and qualifying competitions, the medal table, championship mailings and mailings to Leader-ID, and in spring 2020 a staff survey on well-being and precautions with results for the operational headquarters.

    Reports for the union, regions and universities come from the same database, with no manual summaries.

How it works

eSim is a PHP and jQuery web application with its own API: documents are rendered from HTML to PDF, reports to Excel, data is stored in MySQL. Leaders' dashboards are a separate Vue.js application with a Laravel API: the API reads eSim data through database views and recalculates ratings and analytics every night. Sign-in to the dashboards goes through the single sign-on of the WorldSkills Digital Platform, for which eSim was the source of users and their permissions.

Timeline and scale

  1. May 2018 the development of eSim passes to us: accreditation of demonstration exam centres and its revocation, certificate requests from the WorldSkills Academy.
  2. July–December 2018 the first version of leaders' dashboards, then a new Vue.js application with a separate analytics API and sign-in through the Digital Platform's single sign-on; the voluntary qualification exam; new skills passports for the national final, Hi-Tech and DigitalSkills.
  3. 2019 certificate renewal, the request archive and the register of expiring certificates, approval of line experts, the inter-university championship, passports for the 2019 and 50+ exams, the medal table.
  4. 2020 2020 and BRICS passports, the staff survey, participants' mentors, medal fixes for CIS results. Latest changes in December 2020.

Scale: 5 repositories and about 900 commits over our period; eSim has more than a hundred sections and 28 user roles, and about 30 skills passport templates.

What the client got

  • A system that kept pace with the seasons

    New event formats, documents and rules appeared in a running system that the movement relied on across the country.

  • Documents straight from results

    Skills passports and certificates are generated for each event and year, and participants download them themselves.

  • Leaders see their own results

    Regions and universities compare themselves with others by ratings, competences and participants without asking the union.

Technologies

Status

Project completed. We worked on eSim in 2018–2020. The system kept running after us — at least until 2022, according to the web archive; esim.worldskills.ru no longer opens.

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