Ballarat Wimmera’s best apprentice bricklayer has won gold at the recent WorldSkills Australia 2016 national competition.
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The win has only just started to sink in for Haddon apprentice Trystan Sammut, 19, who said he was very fortunate to win at a national level.
After three days of competition Mr Sammut said the whole team was exhausted after putting their best effort in, adding they were “stoked” they had a win.
“I was shaking when they gave me the medal,” Mr Sammut said.
“They read out the third place, then the second place and I thought I didn’t win, then they said the Ballarat region.”
Mr Sammut has been selected to join the elite Skills Squad team and will be vying for the opportunity to compete in the 2017 WorldSkills International Competition in Abu Dhabi.
And he’s looking forward to attending the first training camp where he will meet his mentor and start developing a training plan for the October 2017 competition.
“We've got a camp coming up next Thursday and I'm looking forward to that and finding out whats going on in the next 12 months,” Mr Sammut said.
If successful in his training, Mr Sammut will join more than 1000 young men and women from 75 countries at the international level and he says he wants to do everything he can to get there.
“There's a lot of hurdles to jump through first and a few other competitions that I'll have to go to,” Mr Sammut said.
“To compete at the international level, after seeing how good it was at nationals is going to be a next level high, I’m really looking forward to it.”
After going into the competition with an open mind, Mr Sammut says that now the journey continues.
“At the start I was happy to finish in the top half and after the second day I assessed what the other competitors were like and I thought, if I could finish in the top three I'd be happy with that,” Mr Sammut said.
“But you still have that eager to win and you want to win, obviously that's the end goal.”
WorldSkills Australia is a not-for-profit organisation which provides young Australians with the opportunity to gain new skills, fast track their career development and compete against their peers in their chosen trade.
