Rising paper prices don’t worry me. Digital printing presses stealing market share don’t worry me. Not even the suicidal price-cutting by my competitors worries me (that much). What keeps me awake at night (a slight exaggeration perhaps but nevertheless a concern) is the fact that there are so few skilled printers being trained nowadays. The average age of a properly-apprenticed machine minder is somewhere around the mid forties – that means that unless we do something soon, within the next twenty years, there will be a dangerous shortage of skilled printers and finishers.
Now, I know technology has made the modern day printing press slightly easier to operate, certainly faster and definitely less physically taxing on the minder, but the skill and experience needed to produce truly excellent print (and the same applies to finishing) can only be delivered through experience. And that’s a hard earned experience – three long, tough years or more in some cases. This is not an industry for the faint hearted or the get rich quick brigade!
Manufacturing (yes, I’m from the school of thought that hangs onto the notion that printers are manufactures) is not appealing to school leavers and why should it be: long hours, physically demanding, often thank-less, wrong end of the value chain and so on vs light air-conditioned offices, staff canteens, blue-sky thinking sessions, chemistry meetings and that gorgeous Andrea in accounts!
I wish I knew the answer. But I can see what the future might hold if we don’t do something now. Increased labour costs and reduced quality both in terms of output and general perception, loss of support service jobs and yet another strand of British manufacturing gone the way of many others.
I know that pressure on margins has never been greater, especially in today’s over-supplied highly demanding market. What proprietor can afford time or money on training? Why take the risk when more often than not there is little or no return on the investment. (Ahh a wider societal discussion there me thinks!) Murray W. Arbiter
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