NOTEBOOK: What We Should Do About Printing Industry's Career Crisis

Printing is holding true to its historic propensity to move with the times. Whatever the customer needs printers to be, that they become. Likewise, suppliers flood the floor of Graph Expo with the tools of tomorrow's trade—new format sheetfed presses, robust digital and speedy wide-format printers, systems to deliver and authenticate mail projects, and initiatives to sustain print as a medium and make it environmentally sustainable, too.

Of all the presentations I attended at the show, and there were many, the Education Summit was the most powerful and affecting. Perhaps surprisingly, this gathering of concerned parties—summoned by an ad hoc group concerned about the gathering crisis in print education—touched on many of the same technology streams and themes permeating the exhibitor presentations on the show floor.

The gist of the Education Summit was the unsettling drop in registration for printing classes among students in post secondary and high schools. As a result, administrators are eliminating classes—further reducing the possibility students will consider careers in the graphic arts industry.

The Education Summit was a powerful first step to draw awareness to this crisis and to offer some possible solutions. Succinct presentations by industry leaders—representing a cross section of association executives, printers, equipment manufacturers and educators—were able to identify a number of core issues. Public policy is one of them. Two speakers called on the government to take an activist role in stemming the decline in our nation's manufacturing base. Industries from machine tools to apparel and furniture manufacturing are migrating to host countries that support these endeavors—and printing is in danger of drifting along with that receding tide to other shores.

The government's assessment of the printing industry is clearly hampered by its ignorance of our size and scope, and its importance to the scheme of the national economy. One speaker read aloud the Department of Commerce definition of graphic arts industry jobs, which are characterized by the U.S. bureaucrats to include painting and sculpture. The Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a discouraging portrait of the printing industry, devastated—in BLS' parochial view—by the rise of digital media. The author of the boilerplate, which has been running for years in federal publications, doesn't realize that the graphic arts business is a hotbed of Web development and is intimately tied to the Internet; more than 12% of print transactions pass through it, says InfoTrends.

Also very telling were characterizations made of the printing industry workplace environment itself. Print plants are often dark, noisy, forbidding and dangerous. Pay scales in a field where operators risk injury, even amputation, are well below what is necessary to attract the best and the brightest. During an IGAS sidetrip to a Tokyo printer, Japan's fourth largest, we saw a vertically integrated plant packed with Komori webs and Akiyama sheetfeds linked by automated materials handlers, everything running almost soundlessly in an acoustically tuned facility. It was a striking distinction to noisome U.S. print and finishing sites—no earplugs required.

It will be impossible to encourage an increasingly networked young workforce unless we: 1) make the workplace safe and inviting; 2) increase use of automation to increase per capita output, and so 3) raise revenue per worker to fund salaries that attract the types of employees we need.

During Graph Expo, GAM student interns enjoyed the thrill of our largest print and Web projects ever (see p.82) on a fast-paced timetable. Our efforts were capped by the award of the 2007 Tom McMillan Award for editorial excellence to Lisa Cross, senior editor and a 20-year GAM staffer.

Printing industry jobs, which sustianabilty to automation and workflow. But the core focus was the crisis in drawing quality workers and the rapid disappearance of print training in the curricula of the nations second and psot secondary schools.

The summit was called by an ad hoc group comprising some of our industries best minds. The career crisis can b summarized succinctly—in addition to a personnel shortage and mounting pace of graying print workers (a 30,000 shortfall annually), the heart of of our best source for new printers is hollowing out. The industry's education system has been in decline for years. Students aren't signing up for print programs at many highschools and secondary instituions. As a result of low interest, administrators are dropping print courses from the curriculum.

While there are some notable exceptions, and even some brand new graphic artrs programs aborning (Kennedy King, Waukesha County, DuPage Count, Curie Highschool, a high school in Washington DC) The choice to kill the printing program is an easy one for schools to make, sinceis also easy for many schools, which may be working with antiquated equipment and no funding for updating it.

The format of the summit was very heartening, because the industry recognizes some of the key problems. To put it in a butshell, printing has a reputation as a dirty dingy industry, to quote presenter Dean Flowers, it is misunderstood by the Federal Government which gathers meaningless data about print functions that don't exist; the salary levels.

There is more to do: noted Tim Fischer COO of NAPL, “Once it was all about > .. . . .Revamp the curriculum to focus less on skills cerification,” noting pay averages $17/hour says it it was too low for an industry where operators risk injury and endure heavy labor and noise. “I don't think we know the problem; I think we know the symptons,” Fischer sayd.

Noted Ben Cooper, “The people outside the industry continue to see us as we were 50 years ago.” We are not alone. Every manufacturing industry ahs the same problem” (citing the machine tool industry) “It's part of a fabric of what is going on across the manufacturing sectores. “Please remember to focus on public policy.”

On the show floor, the theme of automating technology to decrease the labor factor was everywhere in evidence. Werner Naegli at Muller Martini told me all the automation in the bindery is aimed keeping up with speedier presses, and reducing labor. At Heidelberg, Jim Dunn noted that a new Business Development Assessment, which analyzes live business data to objectify the preponderant job formats in a plant, will sometimes result in reduction of presslines—reducing labor pressure (and sometimes funding equipment buys). This was the case with the Polar PACE robotic cutter, which does all the cutting itself.

bill.esler@reedbusiness.com