You don’t need a PhD to know that print training is under threat. At time of writing, one of the country’s most venerable training institutions, RMIT, had decided to close down its printing courses, citing lack of interest from apprentices. It would be easy to despair, but there’s more to the story of apprenticeships in Australia. ProPrint had the opportunity to host a roundtable discussion with the next generation of trade professionals who are funnelling their youthful exuberance into a printing qualification.
Few are better placed to offer an insight into minds of a up-and-coming printing professionals than the nominees for the LIA-Heidelberg Graduate of the Year Award. Seven hopefuls are on the shortlist for the prestigious state award. The initiative is made possible thanks to the support of the two trade associations, as well as the dedicated committee, which currently includes Fuji Xerox Australia’s Denise Thompson and Kayell’s Luke Wooldridge.
The seven graduates are no cookie-cutter group. They include press handling, pre-press, hand binding, screen printing and label production. Age-wise, most fall into the twenty-something bracket that you would expect of a graduating class, but this is not the rule.
Phil Rosie, a press operator at Graphitype Printing in Sydney, proves that you’re never too old for further education. The man has been in the industry his whole life, and can still summon a passion for print that is too rare. He wasn’t always so driven: in fact, Phil’s father pushed
his son into the trade, possibly due to this own unsatisfied desire to become a printer.
“Printing never really interested me when I started,” says Phil. “I couldn’t stand the people and couldn’t stand the work.”
In those days, Phil says, the industry was a closed shop, including the first business he worked for. “There was a lot of nepotism. It was one of those places you’d have to wait for someone to leave in a box before you got into it, and you had to be related to someone to get in there.”
But by pulling a few string, Phil’s old man secured his son a role, and the rest is history. “Eventually I discovered that I was addicted to print. So I’ve done all sorts of things. I’m an accidental printer – but now it’s like a family.”
This is an industry of family firms, so it was surprising that around the table, none of the graduates had a direct generational connection to the trade. Nerida Cunneen, a pre-press apprentice at Pure Colours Digital, and Erica Mast, a bookbinder at All Book Bindery, both started in office roles but were soon lured away from the reception desk. Jarrod Morrison, a press handler at the government-run Land & Property Information print centre, followed his girlfriend to Bathurst and was pointed toward LPI by the local recruitment agency. His fellow LPI apprentice, Brett Foran, ended up in pre-press thanks to a creative streak he has had since primary school.
The closest thing to a family background in print is Murray Grant, a screen printing apprentice who has worked for a number of firms in NSW. Murray only found out later on during his course that his grandfather had been, as he puts it, “an old school offset printer”.
(The seventh and final apprentice, David Whitmore, a digital operator working for Fuji Xerox Australia’s managed print services division, was unable to attend the roundtable.)
This disparate group, who had never met before this lunch, shared another thing in common – they were all, in their own way, ambassadors for the trade. The industry’s future is heavily scrutinised. While discussing the long-term viability of a career in print might seem sensitive territory, the six graduates were all eager to air their views on the subject.
Erica puts it plainly: “When I tell people that I am a bookbinder, it’s usually followed with a ‘that must be very scary, because your industry’s going down the drain’. But I just don’t see that happening.”
It was enlightening to hear what the graduates’ peer group thought of the industry. Their mates, on the whole, don’t even know what the printing industry is.
Phil explains: “They just have no idea. I find it very hard to explain to people what printing is. People say ‘what do you print?’ I’ll say ‘Well, the tip of the iceberg is everything in the supermarket, that’s where you start,” adds Phil.
Just trying to explain what constitutes printing has proved a tricky question to handle. Jarrod says: “My mates just think I press ‘Control+P’.”
Screen printer Murray adds: “They often ask me the question because when I go into, say, Pizza Hut, I will go up to their banners and get very, very close to see what sort of dot they have used or what pattern and try to have a guess. So my friends ask me what I’m doing, and I try to explain it to them, but they seem to drift off after a couple of minutes.”
Erica should have an easier time explaining what constitutes a bookbinder, seeing as the answer is in the name. “The funny thing is that even though it’s very self-explanatory, when people ask me my profession and I say ‘a bookbinder’, I find myself having to dumb it down. I say ‘I make books’, then they automatically assume I’m a bookie of some sort.”
Pre-press operator Nerida says even those close to her can’t get their head around the intricacies of the industry. “I was telling my uncle about this award, and he thought it was just a big green button… ‘what do you get an award for?’”
Outside perceptions
Does it really matter how much the wider populations knows about the trade? Surely the only important thing is that the industry professional understand it? Far from it, say the graduates. Many in the group saw this disconnect with the broader population as the industry’s Achilles heel. They imagined that the lack of awareness of what print is leads to a lack of support for what print does. Meanwhile, the trade has spent so long hiding the black arts of printing that secrecy has become endemic, which does little to galvanise support for greater awareness message.
This is not a new problem. “I think it’s a bit of a tradition in printing, that it’s a closed shop. No one talks. Once you leave the gate, work stays there, and it’s not talked about,” says Phil.
These “gates” even exist within individual companies, says Erica. “Even in one workshop, there would be walls up and they never discussed their own work within the binderies. It is very much a closed-mouth sort of industry. People don’t want to share, because it’s giving away the trade secrets. I think a lot of the problems we can have is that it is so secretive that nobody even knows we exist.”
That’s not to say the closed shop ethos is always a bad thing. Unlike plenty of other professions, printing truly has an industry community. People and companies pull together, whether at major events such as the National Print Awards and trade show, or more regularly through the day-to-day trade relationships that grease the wheels of the industry.
Phil says: “I’ve travelled through a lot of different areas in the industry. I like the fact that it doesn’t really matter where you start from, you can go from litho to flexo, to bookbinding, to screen printing, they’re all connected, and they’re all one big happy family.”
But a lack of wider awareness creates issues around attracting new recruits. The next generation of print professionals – the future of the industry – are plucked from the general populace. If they don’t know what printing is, let alone any of the advantages to a career in graphic arts, there’s little hope of turning around the downward spiral.
Spread the word
Jarrod agrees that there is a problem. The solution, he says, is to spread the message. “You just have to get it out there and tell people what it is, because it seems to me that no one actually knows what the industry does. You need to get some sort of education program showing this is what we do and this is where you can go.”
ProPrint regularly speaks to employers who bemoan the perceived lack of apprentices entering the trade. The news out of RMIT means this is not just idle moaning – the problem has become
so severe that even a major body set up to promote print training have given up on the endeavour.
Murray says: “You really have to spark something inside the younger generation, because we lose interest in something very quickly.
“What I’d like to do is show the procedure of how you can turn a t-shirt into a piece of art. All they see is the design at the end and they’re impressed with that, but they don’t know how it’s done, so to actually show them what goes into that process would spark something inside the younger generation. They would want to get involved in it,” adds Murray.
“You’ve got to find the connection: it could be a t-shirt, a book or a poster.”
Get it out there
Erica says that to raise the credentials of printing requires “exposure more than anything else”. She recommends moving the conversation beyond “just the basic things, like newspapers and books”, and letting younger people see the creative potential in printing.
“A lot of younger people want to grow up to be artists and do all these wonderful things, and they don’t really know what medium to work in. Print is a really brilliant medium for any artist,” she says.
But just because graduates like Erica and Brett had turned to print out of some creative passion, they remain staunchly aware of the business case for the trade. All of the group currently hold production roles. Big customer wins might drive business growth, but cost control and efficiency at the back end are fundamental. The production people manning presses and handling makereadies – such as these apprentices – need to be well aware they are working for a business.
Nerida says: “I’m conscious of it. With pre-press, if there’s a job with a lot of problems that was booked in and meant to be easy and simple – straight in and onto the press – and it hasn’t turned out like that, you don’t want to keep it in pre-press and spend too much time on it. Those costs are not built into the job.”
Fellow pre-press trainee Brett agrees. “We like to stress quality procedures in pre-press, because often there is more than one set of hand on deck with each job, so we have quality checks to minimise wastage. We record all excess waste on the job ticket, so it gets processed. With budgets, it’s my future on the line, so we don’t can’t go over budget with every job.”
The younger generation also brings a set of skills sorely missing at many firms – IT. The employers around the table broadly agreed that they themselves lacked the kind of intimate software know-how that is fast becoming essential in today’s technology-driven printing industry. For some of the graduates, computer technology has been with them since primary school.
There were nodding heads of acknowledgement when Jarrod said he was the go-to guy for any computing questions from older hands in his workplace. “Just basic stuff, even Microsoft Word. We’ve been using computers for so long it just comes naturally to us.”
The flipside of this, though, was that there was consensus that people outside the industry would have little idea how computer-driven it is, and how a career path in print could go hand in hand with IT skills.
To attract new recruits for the long haul, there needs to be a career path. In print, production people often take their technical understanding out on the road in sales roles and then on to the management arena. A show of hands proved that many around the table could see themselves moving out of production and into sales.
It fell to long-term print tragic Phil, for the last word on this. “I talk about print night and day, so yes, I could no doubt sell. I would enjoy working in a management role.
“But I do like getting my hands dirty. If I was not able to produce anything in the factory, I would find it really hard. I’d have to get a house with a garage with a GTO in it. It’s the smell of the ink and the paper – you’ve got to have it.”
Maybe print is in safe hands after all.
Apprenticeships… what the bosses think
Dave Morris, Graphitype
We all try to keep the printing family going, and I think for this we need apprentices. We make a conscious effort to try to get more younger people into our business.
Ricky Joliffe, Pure Colours
It’s all very well to have someone with on-the-job training, but I think there is so much more behind what we do and don’t really see any other way of doing that, other than proper formal training. The most accessible form of training is through the apprenticeship system. Coming through that system myself, I got a lot out of it and I better production person because of it.
Ben Weal, LPI
A lot of it is succession planning. At every workplace, there’s people retiring at some stage and you’ve got to keep filling those holes. Having apprentices helps keep my skills valid, and it’s good to hand on also the knowledge that I have gained from the trade.
Nicole Thompson, Fuji Xerox
I think in any industry to be seen as a profession, you need minimum qualifications, so that’s how we look at it. So if you come on board now, you either have the qualification or are willing
to do it. If they’re eligible for an apprentice-ship great, and if they’re not, we’ll pay for it.
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