Employee retention

It can be tempting to regard skills training and staff upgrading as a cost that must be managed down, rather than an investment that promotes growth and future-proofs your business. 

Skills training, from keeping up with the latest print software and equipment to mastering design or digital marketing, can be expensive, time consuming, and disruptive to daily operations. Plus, it’s easy to believe that staff will go elsewhere once they upgrade their skills, leaving you in the lurch.

In reality, a skills training program will generate handsome dividends for your company and place you in a much stronger competitive position.

Your employees are your biggest asset. They’re more important than the multi-million dollar presses on your shop floor. It just makes sense to invest in maintaining them, just as you would with that expensive equipment.

The final installment of our three-part labor series focuses on employing automation as a competitive advantage.

In the first part of this series, we analyzed the aging, skilled labor market—the trend of older employees leaving the workforce and strategies for recruiting youthful as well as more mature workers. Next, we delved into how to hold on to staffers already on the payroll.  In Part 3 of three, we analyze automation advancements as part of the solution to printing industry staffing shortages.

With the overall cost of doing business increasing and production volumes decreasing, how can print service providers (PSPs) maintain profit margins and still make money? The ability to print more jobs at faster rates becomes paramount. Automated technologies allow employees to perform critical pre-press, printing, and post-press operations without requiring years of experience as apprentices or junior assistants. For example, achieving precise colors on the press has become a case of science trumping subjectivity, according to Shawn Sundquist, president and CEO of Range Printing, Inc. (Brainerd, MN).

“In some respects, the skilled-labor shortage has forced the issue,” says Sundquist, a third-generation leader at the company his grandfather founded 55 years ago. “There is definitely an older demographic in our pressroom running the presses,” he notes, lamenting that the vast majority of younger workers don’t seem to care much about the intricacies of mechanical inner-workings.

“Young people are used to pressing the ‘easy button,’” Sundquist observes.

In the first part of this series we analyzed the aging, skilled labor market and the trend of older employees leaving the workforce, which can have a detrimental impact on industries, including the printing business, that depend on knowledge and expertise. “That kind of brain drain . . . could put a little more pressure on companies to figure out ways to hang on to older workers,” believes Michael Madowitz, director of macroeconomic policy at Equitable Growth.

We also suggested ways to recruit younger employees to the print sector. Enlist the help of outsiders, such as industry consultants, to work with state agencies and educational institutions. This strategy can be one smart move for printing companies trying to overcome a negative image of their industry in the minds of young people.