Familiar Face wins the Cat Global Dealer Technician Challenge

by Nick Drew | Thu 30 Apr 2026

Familiar Face wins the Cat Global Dealer Technician Challenge

It was a competition the likes of which we had not seen before, as 10 of the very best Caterpillar technicians battled it out to see who would be crowned as the best of the best from around the world, with the presentation taking place at Conexpo-Con/Agg in Las Vegas in March this year.

Machine maintenance work is a totally different ball game to how it was back in my days on the machines, gone are the days when a fitter/mechanic, as we used to refer to them, would pop out with a bag of spanners & a few sockets and get you going again.

The Global Dealer Technician Challenge showcased the high-tech, high-impact nature of today’s technician careers. The competition spotlighted the agility, diagnostic expertise and problem-solving skills required to keep customers’ equipment running at peak performance through a series of challenges in which technicians had to accurately diagnose and make repairs under intense time pressure.

Caterpillar states that dealers continue to experience strong demand for technicians. By the end of 2028, Cat dealers may need to hire more than 38,000 technicians globally. The challenge competition was designed to raise awareness of these opportunities and encourage individuals who are mechanically inclined, tech-savvy and eager to solve complex problems to consider a career with a Cat dealer.

While checking out this competition over the weekend, I realised that the winner Tom March, was featured in a series on this blog way back in 2020, when he had left his home in Carlisle in 2012 to go and live and work in Canada, where he eventually set up his own business carrying out repairs on a large fleet of Caterpillar machines.

I had no idea that he had returned back to the UK and was now working for Finning UK & Ireland, but it was fantastic to see that he had won the global competition and brought the prize home to the UK.