We arrived as three Level 3 college students. We left with the first-place shield from a competition designed for Levels 4 and 5.
On 18 March 2025, our Preston College team travelled to Blackpool University Centre for the Lancashire and Cumbria Institute of Technology’s World Skills Cyber Competition. It formed part of The Lancashire Colleges Skills Competition and was endorsed by WorldSkills UK.
Four Lancashire colleges entered teams of three and four. Across one day, we had to move between data analysis, digital innovation and cybersecurity while industry judges watched how we solved problems as well as what we produced.
Preston took first place. Blackburn College came second and Blackpool and The Fylde College came third. The shield was the visible result, but the useful part was discovering what happens when a team has to change its mode of thinking repeatedly without losing momentum.
Three challenges, three different kinds of thinking
The data task gave us a complex dataset and a tight deadline. The goal was not to produce the most charts. It was to work out which patterns mattered, turn those patterns into defensible insights and communicate them clearly enough that somebody else could act.
The digital innovation challenge shifted from evidence to invention. We had to conceptualise a wellbeing and mindfulness app, thinking through the user need, the experience and how the idea could become a coherent mobile product. It tested judgement: choosing which parts of an idea deserved attention when there was not enough time to build everything.
The cybersecurity task moved us into diagnosis and response. We identified threats and vulnerabilities, worked through how they could be mitigated and fixed a compromised PC. Here, creativity mattered less than disciplined observation. A missed detail could undermine the rest of the solution.
Range won the day, but teamwork made that range usable.
Each challenge rewarded different instincts. Analysis asks you to reduce noise. Innovation asks you to open possibilities. Cybersecurity asks you to distrust assumptions. The difficult part was not switching between them individually; it was keeping the whole team aligned while we switched.
The task was never only technical
A competition compresses the conditions of real work. The brief is incomplete, the clock is visible and every choice removes time from another choice. Under that pressure, technical ability is only useful if the team can coordinate it.
We had to make our thinking legible to one another. Who had the strongest view on the problem? Which decision needed discussion, and which one simply needed somebody to own it? When should we keep exploring, and when was the answer strong enough to move on?
My comment after the event was that it came down to teamwork and communication. That can sound like the standard answer after a group competition. In this case, it was literal. No individual could disappear into one specialist task for the entire day. We needed to combine our perspectives quickly, explain the trade-offs and keep solving the same problem together.
The judges noticed that. The event report highlighted the Preston team’s positivity, teamwork and enjoyment of the challenges—not just the outputs we submitted. Enjoyment might sound secondary, but it changed how we worked. Curiosity made us more willing to test an idea, admit when it was weak and try a better one.
Competing above our level changed the stakes
We were studying at Level 3. The other teams were made up of Level 4 and 5 learners. That difference could have become an excuse before the competition even began.
Instead, it removed the temptation to judge ourselves by the label beside our course. The tasks were the same for everyone. Once the timer started, our level mattered less than the quality of the questions we asked, the decisions we made and the way we responded when an approach did not work.
Winning did not prove that levels or formal education are meaningless. The knowledge we brought came from our course and the people teaching it. What it proved was narrower and more useful: a qualification level describes where learning is structured, not the ceiling of what a student can contribute on a particular day.
The three disciplines were closer than they looked
At first, data analysis, product design and cybersecurity can look like separate career paths. The competition showed how often they sit inside one problem.
A useful digital product needs evidence about its users. It needs a clear interaction that turns that evidence into value. It also needs to protect the people and information moving through it. Ignore any one of those layers and the solution becomes less useful, less usable or less trustworthy.
That lesson has stayed relevant in my work since college. Automations and internal products still require the same movement between modes: understand the data, design the experience, anticipate where the system can fail and explain the outcome to people with different expertise.
The tools have changed and the scale has grown, but the basic shape of the work is surprisingly similar to that competition day.
A shield is evidence, not the whole lesson
First place made the day memorable. It also gave the team and the college something concrete to celebrate. But the larger result was confidence built on evidence.
We did not leave believing we could solve every digital problem. We left knowing that we could enter an unfamiliar brief, divide it intelligently, work under pressure and produce something that stood up against teams further along in formal education. That is a much more durable kind of confidence than simply being told you have potential.
Thank you to the organisers, Blackpool University Centre, the industry judges, every competing college and the people at Preston who prepared and trusted us to represent them. The competition pushed us beyond our perceived limits—and gave us a result we could point to when those limits tried to return.