On Friday 1 November, 345Robotics was featured at the Workforce Opportunities & Residency Cayman (WORC) “Tech Expo”, held at the University College of the Cayman Islands.
WORC – a department of the Cayman Islands Government – used this event to showcase numerous community organisations and business involved in transforming the nature of work.
Our chief roboticist Brandon Ebanks showcased the 2024-25 VexIQ competition “Rapid Relay” throughout the day to groups of excited students (and adults!).

WORC’s graphic – “Skills on the Rise in the Next Five Years” – provides some orienting ideas about the near term future of work in the Cayman Islands:
- Creative thinking
- Analytical thinking
- Technological literacy
- Curiosity and lifelong learning
- Resilience, flexibility and agility
- Systems thinking
- Artificial intelligence and big data
- Motivation and self awareness
- Talent management
- Service orientation and customer service [We took this photo on a screen and the timing didn’t work out to get the checkmark in front of #10 🙂 ]

These human skills, for a workforce of today and the future, are part of the holistic vision of robotics competition. Focusing specifically on that, in this “STEM Heroes” podcast, Jason McKenna (Vex Robotics) discusses the agency that kids get from being involved in something — a robot that is “all theirs”. Kids need to feel they *belong* to something: a robotics team creates enthusiasm for belonging [and notably — through all of this they’ve willingly signed up for “hundreds of hours of work”].