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As the world becomes more interconnected and our lives increasingly depend on the cyber world, the increasing threat of cyberattacks and cybercrimes make it critical for us to provide better and practical training of the cybersecurity workforce. In recent years, cybersecurity competition has become one of the most effective and attractive way for educating and training college students or professionals. In this paper, we first systematically introduce in details the step-by-step procedure and technical knowledge on how we take use of the ongoing DoD cyber-range environment called Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE) to set up cyber competition virtualization environment, configure and install operating systems and popular services with various well-representative vulnerabilities, and set up the participant’s access and scoring system. Then we introduce the cybersecurity competition successfully organized by us in I/ITSEC 2019 conference, and the experience and lessons learned from this real-world competition event. The technical details and knowledge presented in this paper could help other researchers and educators to set up their own cyber competition environment or event to better train the future cybersecurity workforce.