WorldSkills is the world championship for young professional talents. Melvin Deubelbeiss, an electronics engineer at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI, won the silver medal this year. The reward for painstaking preparation.
How many electronics engineers can say they ever ran into a packed arena to be greeted like a football star by more than ten thousand cheering spectators? Melvin Deubelbeiss experienced exactly that at the opening ceremony of WorldSkills 2024 in Lyon, France, in mid-September. “It was an unbelievable feeling to celebrate together with the Swiss group. Apart from the French fans, they definitely made the most noise.” This first thrill was followed by a second when Emmanuel Macron walked past Melvin just a few metres away. The French President gave a short speech that evening.
Today the PSI electronics engineer is still full of impressions from Lyon, where he competed against the best in the world in the Electronics category. The competition lasted four days – and each day there were different tricky tasks to solve under time pressure: developing a circuit using given components, programming software for a slot machine, repairing a broken compass. Naturally, it also involved the central component of every electronic system: the circuit board on which the contacts for the components and their connections are attached. Melvin had to design and solder such a board himself.
Off to the podium!
Then, the closing ceremony in the Lyon football stadium. Hundreds of electronics engineers, app developers, refrigeration and air conditioning technicians, mechatronics engineers, and others from all over the world were bustling around excitedly – the award ceremony was about to begin. Suddenly the leader of the 45-strong Swiss team took Melvin aside and told him to be ready! «And then everything happened very quickly: I stood on the podium and was presented with the silver medal.» Second place at WorldSkills – a great success!
This was the result of hard work. The preparation started in November 2023, ten months before Lyon. Melvin trained with a predefined circuit board layout tool, a software program that can be used to lay out circuit boards, and wrote a series of index cards with electronic circuits that he learned by heart, often including formulas. Because WorldSkills is strict: The competitors are not allowed to have any formula collections or code examples with them. Everything has to be stored in their heads and quickly retrievable.
Technically and mentally on top of your game
The preparation also included media training from SwissSkills, the foundation of the Swiss vocational championships, and preparatory tests organised by SwissMEM, the association of the Swiss tech industry. In between, they traveled, for example taking part in international training courses in China and Austria. Melvin also practiced programming – because writing clean code is as much a part of the electronics trade as skillful handling of a soldering iron. Help came especially from Mario Liechti, a PSI-trained silver medallist in the 2022 WorldSkills competition. “It was reassuring to be able to go to him with any conceivable problem.” Electronics engineer Markus Lempen from Bern, whom SwissMEM assigned to Melvin as an expert and advisor, also played a major role in his success.
In retrospect, Melvin says this painstaking technical preparation was necessary for success. “That's how you build up self-confidence and develop the feeling that you can master any task.” In addition to the know-how, the internalisation of processes, a good portion of mental strength was also required – and that's what the sessions with a mental trainer were for. “A competition like this is a very special situation. I have to be able to completely block out everything around me and concentrate fully on my task. I trained for that – and it worked.”
Melvin's conclusion? He can only recommend that everyone take part in such an international event. The past year has been a tough time, but also a beautiful one. “Taking part in such events opens doors and gives your career a boost.”
Communicative test module
After all the strain and high emotions, everyday life has returned, and Melvin is back at work in the Electronics for Measurement Systems group at PSI. His specialty is automated testing of circuit boards. He builds modules that can be used to check whether these really perform as expected – for example, whether signals in the Swiss Light Source SLS are processed and guided as intended.
One test module that Melvin laid out, programmed, and soldered before Lyon is a special type of transceiver – called quad small form-factor pluggable or QSFP – that is used to connect network devices via copper or fibre-optic cables. QSFPs have four high-speed channels, and each of these channels can transmit and receive data independently. The tests involving them run like this: The processor in the circuit board, the brain of the entire system, communicates with actuators and sensors that Melvin has placed on the QSFP module. “This way we can quickly find out whether everything is working properly.”
In the future, too, Melvin will be building modules for testing circuit boards used in experimental systems. “The researchers can really go wild with that.” Besides soldering and programming, Melvin also supervises apprentices in their third or fourth year of training in the spring semester. They can use a tip or two for their projects.
Where does the newly crowned silver medallist of Lyon find the main motivation in his professional life? The answer, short and to the point: “I want to have fun in my work.”
Further information
Even before Lyon, Melvin knew the feeling of being in the spotlight while wielding the soldering iron. He had taken part in SwissSkills three times – and won in 2022 and 2023: