Two South African students have placed highly in two international design competitions that tested their design skills with Adobe and Microsoft Office software.

Tiffany Onderstall, a 19-year-old student at Cape Town’s Inscape Education Group, came second overall in the 2015 Adobe Certified Associate competition that tested her ability to create an engaging banner for the Room To Read campaign using Adobe InDesign, PhotoShop and Illustrator. She was one of over 88 000 entries in the category, and only missed the top spot by one place, losing out to Li-Hsin Hsu from Taiwan.

You can see the final banner entries on Flickr by clicking here.

Samantha Knupp, a student at Elkanah House High School (also in Cape Town), placed third overall in the 2015 Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship, in which she demonstrated her skills at creating documents using Microsoft Word 2010. Impressively, her third place was won out of over 600 000 entries.

Both competitions were hosted by Certiport in Dallas, Texas, USA, and the two South African girls were sponsored by NetLearn of South Africa.

The driving force behind the two contests was to “showcase digital communications skills and promote industry certification” according to the official press release, and to encourage young people to acquire those skills as they’re incredibly useful in the modern workplace.

Well done, ladies!