With National Apprenticeship Week taking place earlier this month we’d always planned our HR toolkit feature to be on apprenticeships. But with this coinciding with the BPIF-led submission to create new print apprenticeship standards getting ‘trailblazer’ status, the subject of our main news briefing, and the ‘Killer app’ featuring the Fed’s promotional brochure extoling the virtues of print apprenticeships to schools – then frankly we’ve never been more ‘yoof’.

For as long I can remember the lack of youngsters entering print has been a major concern, with the average age of people working in the print industry dangerously inching towards 50.

However, in the past 12 months there seems to be more and more talk of apprenticeships in print, with an increasing number of companies taking on trainees, or at least talking about the possibility of doing so.

And I don’t know about you but I was amazed (and encouraged) to learn that there could be as many as 1,000 apprentices working in UK print businesses today. 

I appreciate that’s probably still too few, but it’s still a hell of a lot more than I thought it would be.

In fact, while in the recent past the challenge of accelerating the flow of new blood into the industry was probably convincing employers to take on apprentices, in the not too distant future the bigger issue will probably be finding enough apprentices to satisfy the demands of the employers.

So now that we’ve convinced ourselves that apprenticeships are key to print’s exciting long-term future, we need to start thinking of ways of convincing the next generation that a career in print offers the same to them.