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Training is industry's Achilles' heel
It is a source of immense irritation to me that people (who should know better) constantly pillory the printing industry for conservatism and unwillingness to change. Where have they been for the past three or four decades?
Most of the critics have not experienced the responsibility of investing hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of pounds in plant and machinery and ensuring a proper return on capital. It is daunting to contemplate some of the management decisions that have been made with great aplomb and vision.
One needs to be reminded that over the past thirty or more years the industry has converted wholesale from letterpress to lithographic printing, while pre-press has undergone a radical change from photomechanical analogue to advanced digital methods. Once pre-press was dominated by handicraft techniques and mechanical equipment, as opposed to the electronic and computerised procedures prevailing nowadays. Complete trades have disappeared, instanced by electrotyping, stereotyping and process engraving. What more do these remote, pontificating, and theorising critics expect or want?
Printing has managed technological and commercial change with some panache and effectiveness that compares favourably with some other sectors of the national economy. As production techniques, markets, and competition evolve, I am confident that the printing industry will continue to flourish.
Perhaps the worst omission of the industry over the past twenty years has been a failure to invest in substantive training: a byproduct of Thatcherism.
Lawrence Wallis held international pre-press marketing positions and was a respected author and print historian.
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Comments
Mark Snee - 29 August 2008
With the greatest respect to your former columnist Mr Wallis, his last paragraph is complete and utter rubbish, topped off with an unneccesary political jibe.
I started my company in 1984, just as the letterpress age was ended: I have seen the technological progession of twenty-five years first hand. Today I have one of the best teams of people I have ever had - young, multi-skilled, capable of operating very sophisticated equipment.
I believe the industry is full of people like this, so we might just consider where all these skills came from? Not from government, that's for sure. But for the second half of my twenty-five years in the industry, government has been taking a bigger and bigger slice of the cake and then spending it on so-called training. It has built a massive Soviet-style infrastructure presided over by the biggest quango in Europe, the Learning and Skills Council, which has been spending in excess of £11 billion of OUR money EVERY YEAR since 2001. How much of this money filters down to support OUR industry? A tiny fraction.
So the biggest failure has certainly not been the failure of our industry to invest in substantive training; it has been the scandal of having to pay TWICE for a competent workforce - once through the tax system and then again to do some real training in company.
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