Training of staff is an area that has continued to be neglected by printing companies, to great detriment. Training is the smartest direction a company can take, argues Vanessa Peel of TPG Training.

As an industry we have been through significant changes over the last 10 years and there are many more changes still to come. We talk about ‘change’ but what in reality has happened? Many companies have gone to the wall, and many of those that are left have embraced change head on. We talk about smart solutions, from web to print to cross media and the digital age, but as an industry how does this filter into how we view a day’s training, which to my mind is the smartest solution of them all?

I listen to businesses on why they interrupt training and most of the reasons are based on the present rather than the business future; companies still do not see that their biggest asset is their staff.

The most common reasons are:

1. Time

2. Money

3. No internal management structure to support training

4. No idea what they want or need but know they need something

We still as an industry have the same issues that we had ten, 15, even 20 years ago. Many managing directors still have no formal training. They drive the business, look at profit and loss, and monitor their businesses from afar, and are still fire-fighting. They often don’t have any idea what is likely to be delivered to their clients that day or the next, and often have no idea what is happening on the shop floor.

There was a company that I visited recently which had a staff of 60 employees. I was talking about change management programmes and when I asked the managing director to give me a tour of the factory and to introduce me to his staff on the shop floor, he said: ‘Yes I can give you the tour, but I don’t know all the staff names, as they come and go so quickly.’

Middle management is often a family member that has been promoted through the business but has no formal qualifications to support the business structure. I still see management at this level motivating their staff essentially by bullying or fear or promising them overtime as a solution to a production problem.

Managing directors complain that they never get the right calibre of sales staff, when the business is declining in sales, but what they do is employ more sales people, sometimes paying £50,000 or £60,000 per addition of an experienced member of staff. The cost to the business is then disproportionate; they would probably have to invest less than half of that amount on sales training for their current staff, which would rejuvenate and revitalise the sales team and still have the same effect on the declining bottom line. Alternatively they could look at the basic principles of managing the shop floor: quality, lean manufacturing techniques, 5S, waste management, cost of reprints or re-working jobs, supply chain.

Many of the shop floor staff have a formal qualification, such as a traditional apprenticeship, but this generation is now going out of the industry, either through retirement or just leaving the industry entirely. Shop floor supervisors are not given the time, money or resource to develop their staff, nor are they given time to cross-train their operators to use different kit.

The machine operators on the shop floor are given training upon the arrival of a new piece of equipment, but instead of training three or four people to be able to operate the kit, the company only pays the supplier to train one or two employees – normally due to cost. This then pushes up the salary for specialised trained operators and then they jump ship as they are approached by a competing company that has purchased the same kit. This has created a fear within management which actively discourages training in their businesses at any level.

Then there is apprenticeship training. With Leeds City College closing its doors to formal print training, where do businesses go now? Proskills has shrunk to such a degree that it has almost disappeared.

The certification for the NVQs for the print industry sits under the Glass & Glazing Federation, as this is the only way that funding could be drawn down. 

Why did this happen? I believe it is because, as an industry, we did not see the need for new blood. 

Companies talked the talk, but were too short sighted to see that our fabulous industry training was going to disappear. And that is exactly what has happened.

There are lessons to be learned from how other companies approach industry training. Companies in Brazil, for example, pay a compulsory payroll tax towards training, helping to fund large training colleges – 63 in total for industry, including the print sector.

Whilst spending time with government training providers in Brazil we were fortunate enough to visit a number of training and print colleges in Rio and Sao Paulo. Young people in Brazil have access to apprenticeships and youth schemes where they teach modern and traditional printing methods. Progression for the more ambitious happens via night school and everyone we spoke to was highly committed; learning in Brazil is a fundamental way of life. 

Training for the UK print industry has now become a ‘City of Tents’, with varying providers – either training companies, trade associations or even individual consultants – ostensibly all preaching the same message that we have for the last 15 years but not pulling together. Wouldn’t a collective voice be better than what the industry has now?