TIANJIN, Oct. 2 -- From among hundreds of thousands of participants nationwide, 4,045 skilled individuals successfully qualified to compete at the second Vocational Skills Competition, recently held in north China's Tianjin Municipality.

Focusing on promoting the training, deployment, evaluation and incentive mechanism of skilled talents, the event has been regarded as the biggest and most high-profile comprehensive national vocational skills competition.

This year's edition featured a staggering 109 competitive events, covering 15 categories of national economic sectors, including manufacturing, information technology, transportation, construction, services and mining, among others.

Competitive events for new occupations and digital technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) engineering, and Internet of Things (IoT) installation and debugging, attracted wide attention.

In the VR engineering technology competition, participants were required to create a three-dimensional model of a fan within a stipulated time frame.

"Participants can add their creativity and innovation during the process, making the model more diverse and functional," said Liu Yue, the chief judge of the event, who is also a professor at the School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology.

"More than 200 vocational colleges nationwide have launched VR-related majors," Liu said, adding that VR is expected to better serve the real economy in the era of immersive internet.

Last year, the profession of "tidying-up expert" was officially included in the category of residential service personnel, making it one of the 158 newly added professions.

Luo Xin, an associate professor specializing in modern domestic service and management at Hubei Preschool Teachers College, participated in the domestic service competition.

"The 'tidying-up expert' is a new profession with high market demand. This year, the college celebrated its inaugural graduating class in this major, achieving a remarkable 100 percent employment rate for these graduates," Luo added.

"Behind the emergence of new professions is the support of new business formats, which reflect that China's economy is taking solid steps towards high-quality development. At the same time, it signifies new opportunities for development and fresh employment prospects, which are of great significance for enhancing the social recognition of professionals in these new occupations and promoting employment and entrepreneurship," said Li Zhanqiang, an official of the competition's executive committee.

According to the latest statistics released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the number of skilled workers in China has exceeded 200 million, accounting for more than 26 percent of the national workforce, of whom over 60 million individuals are highly skilled.