While print firm managers are quick to recognise the value of improving the skills of their staff, some are reluctant to practice what they preach. They worry that, by adding too many strings to a worker’s bow, that employee will take a better job at another company.

And stagnant prices, rising costs and overcapacity mean margins are tight and many firms can’t afford to send staff offsite for training.

Yet Proskills, the industry body for the process and manufacturing sector, says that, of the seven industry sectors it represents, the print industry has the fastest changing needs for the development of new skills. In print, training needs to be on the boardroom agenda as much as the classroom blackboard.

And, according to Proskills chief executive Terry Watts, it’s not just managers who treat offsite training with trepidation. “The people who often need training are those who left school at 16 without proper qualifications. To ask them to go back into that learning environment can be stressful,” he says. “We try to fix that by talking to the unions. Someone on a print line may feel exposed talking to the boss, but may feel more comfortable talking to their colleague who’s a union rep.”

So training is not a black-and-white issue, particularly when you consider the UK’s greying workforce: workers are reaching retirement or being made redundant, and taking their know-how with them. Likewise, recruitment is in decline – intake of apprentices fell 19% between 2005/05 and 2005/06. Advanced apprenticeships dropped 29%.

Richer blend
Given these conflicting pressures, how then can print afford to fulfil its training needs? Recently, this question has led to some radical and innovative solutions, chiefly in the form of online training.

Watts says the future is about “blended learning”, where the trainer uses a range of delivery options, be they onsite, offsite or online.

One printer that gets full marks for online education is Polestar. The firm has been spreading the training message through its Print Dynamics initiative for the past five years, reaching out to staff, buyers and some 60,000 students through the PrintIT! scheme. Print Dynamics is the brainchild of group training director Darrin Stevens, who was himself plucked from the education sector when, in 2003, Polestar heard about an interactive training CD he had developed in his postgraduate teaching diploma at Huddersfield University.

In the five years since trading the lecture hall for the print room, Stevens has augmented his passion for training with print expertise, and he understands the pressure offsite training puts on printers. “Production has to come first, so training is always on the backburner,” he says. “Because we’re all running so slim, we don’t have the luxury of sending someone off even for a few hours training.”  However, figures from Vision in Print (ViP) show that training will add some breathing space to a choked operation, and help the bottom line too. As of December 2007, the improvement body had financial figures on a third of the 230 programmes it has run, showing that the average added-value boost in the first year after implementing a ViP scheme is £128,000. And in terms of cost, ViP is confident of a tenfold payback by the end of year one.

Handheld delivery
Fiscal boosts need to be balanced against the human cost. Stevens recognises the fear factor students face: “If you’re going to take an exam and you haven’t done one for 30 years, you’re going to be anxious.” This is where Print Dynamics steps in. After five years of delivering the training materials on CD, Polestar has embraced the digital age by putting coursework out on the internet, and the future, Stevens says, is handheld. “With technology like the iPod Touch, BlackBerry, mobile phone, Nintendo DS, you can do something revolutionary.” Forget the classroom or the shopfloor, Stevens says: “You can go to, say, McDonalds or Costa where there’s free WiFi and do some training. It’s using what’s here now.”

The idea is not a pipedream. Stevens claimed an industry first in March when 14 production executives from publishers Emap and Bauer graduated from a Polestar-led diploma. Rather than textbooks, students received iPods containing course material, videos, illustrations and photos. “The magic was that the resource was carried around 24/7 so they’d always have the information at their fingertips,” says Stevens.

While Polestar didn’t charge for the courses, the long-term financial benefits of having well-educated customers are huge. It creates efficiencies between buyer and printer that streamline the ordering process while cutting costs. It also engenders loyalty, which means long-term dividends. But focusing on clients is just one facet of training. For Polestar, it’s as much about blended students as blended learning. The printer gets teenagers interested in the industry through schemes such as PrintIT! and also takes advantage of apprenticeships and employee training to keep its staff fully skilled and build company loyalty.

Stevens says: “We have more than 100 apprenticeships and a 92% retention rate. People are loyal to people who develop them. You’ll get the odd one who wants to try something different and see what else is out there, but that’s the risk. Life with no risk is no life at all. Let’s get past that and all take the risk of training our people.”

Risk averse
However, George Thomas, director of training services at 30-staff Oxuniprint, doesn’t regard this risk as a bad thing. “We recently trained a member of staff up with a view to extracting the best from them,” says Thomas. However, the firm found there was nowhere for the employee to go within the business. So Thomas and his team actively helped the employee find a position at another firm. “If we hadn’t, they would’ve gone elsewhere anyway, and we wouldn’t have got so much out of them.” This pragmatic approach to training has helped the printer win the National Training and Development Employers gong at the BPIF Printing World Excellence Awards two years running. Its detailed training plan is directly linked to Oxuniprint’s five-year vision, so that staff improvement is mapped against business success, and vice versa. The results are impressive. Thomas says: “We’ve grown turnover 30% in the past 12 months, while staff count has remained the same.”

Training helped the firm triumph both in the awards and in its full-year figures, so it’s no wonder Thomas takes issue with those that see training as negative or an unnecessary risk. “Training can only be a good thing. It’s a reward. But if the industry doesn’t get a handle on this, we’ll see more polarisation, where the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker, which can only be a bad thing.”

A step forward
Using training to help printers avoid this polarisation is the job of Proskills’ printing industry champion Richard Bloxam. To succeed in this industry, “you need to have a broad underpinning of information”, he says. “Print firms are small and should be quite entrepreneurial. Employees should see the opportunities and know how to make their operations more effective.” And in our crowded marketplace, missing those opportunities is a step in the wrong direction.

Polestar’s Stevens says: “If you only train one person a year, that’s a step forward. If we train one person in every business, across 16,000 print firms in the UK, that’s 16,000 better trained people.”

When publisher Emap wanted to give its staff a grounding in all things print, it turned to Polestar’s “rounded, one-stop training programme”, Print Dynamics. For six months, 14 production employees were embedded at five Polestar plants across the UK to gain industry insight, including real-world training from suppliers; Sun Chemical tackled inks, SCA ran a hands-on unit on paper and J&G Environmental covered green issues. Leeds University’s Chris Stott helped give a practical education into pre-press while the university’s Centre of Industrial Collaboration highlighted the importance of colour management. At the end, the students left with the ‘Emap Evolve Diploma’, equivalent to a Level Three NVQ or PPA certificate.

What truly set the course apart was that it embraced multimedia technology, in particular by giving all students iPods filled with coursework. In line with the collaborative approach, Kodak came through with funds to tailor the existing training system to the iPod format. Polestar group training director Darrin Stevens says that despite the course being firmly stamped with the Polestar masthead, Print Dynamics is about helping the whole industry. “Everything we do, we do it for the sector, for customers, for schools and for competitors,” he says. And it doesn’t stop in the UK. “We have had requests from America, Australia, China, India. We have had students from America at Polestar studying Print Dynamics and have taken away a wealth of information. We have found the more we give away, the more we get back.”