Printing industry educator Annette Wolf Bensen sent her thoughts on the state of industry education:

I am grateful to Frank Romano for his articles on this important subject, and I am gratified by the passion of the responses. I applaud all the educational funding efforts. It’s obvious that prospective students need a single source for all graphics scholarship information, but nowhere in all the discussion did I see “why don’t we?” or “I can do that”. Nobody is stepping up to do the job.

Teachers need our help. When and where do they get their industry information? In New York City, industry volunteers present Graphics Teacher Technology Conferences to support teachers so they can keep their programs and their students up to date on trends and technologies.

Wouldn’t it be grand if more of you reached out to the high schools in your area and invited a teacher to work in your company for the summer? Work out the financial and logistical details, but get a motivated teacher learning first-hand on your equipment in a working commercial environment. Let’s nurture teachers by mentoring them, giving them access to a live person to talk to and ask questions. Let’s get some of our dedicated vendor partners together and come up with a viable curriculum for digital presses and VPD. I hear from Xerox and HP and Heidelberg and others that they can’t find competent staff to cover the job openings in this field. Some local groups are already working on this, but we need to band together as an industry to make it more comprehensives and accessible.

There was a Graphic Arts Education Summit at this year’s GraphExpo. How about inviting -- and paying for -- some high school teachers to attend functions like this and get them to shed light on what’s happening in their schools? How can we, as an industry, help:

a. convince the education system that printing is not a dirty word and does not have to be taken out of the language in high schools

b. get school systems to stop using printing programs as dumping grounds for unfocussed students

c. make room in high schools for the extra space and equipment needed to teach this complex and vital subject

d. educate the educators that printing is growing and changing so much that their conventional employment stats must be re-thought to incorporate in-plant printing, corporate communications technologies and all the many forms of commercial graphics

This last point is important. We have a big problem with the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) system for analyzing business activity. The government uses NAICS codes to make policy, and the codes are woefully out of step with business reality. With digital and desktop technologies, our workforce has been transformed. More and more companies have their own pre-press departments. I don’t see the NAICS figures tracking this. We’re not counting the pre-press or printing departments in retail companies like Lord & Taylor or Macy’s or Bloomberg or JP Morgan Chase or Harford Insurance -- or the big busy departments in accounting firms or manufacturing organizations or law offices. Politicians and bureaucrats don’t care about an industry they can’t measure.

Let’s go further. We need to reach out to lower and middle schools and get these kids interested before high school. With a good marketing program, we should tell kids that that there is an industry called printing, and it is not full of dirty old machines, and it’s not a mindless job. We need to communicate with politicians and the powers-that-be in education that they are print buyers and print users, too. We can do all that, but we need to do it together.

And what about our vendors? One of the responses regarding vendors was right on the money. Each year in New York we hold a high school graphics competition which includes printing, page make-up, digital photography, web design and PowerPoint presentation. We give trophies and prizes to the winners. It’s like pulling teeth to get some of our vendors – big companies making millions off our industry -- to donate even a few hundred dollars for gifts. What a shame! Investing in the future of the industry does not appear to be on most vendors’ plates. On the other hand, thank God, there are those firms who have come through year after year, and I am sure that their names will be in these kids’ vocabularies for many years to come. What do we have to do to shake some cash out of these organizations? A little investment in education goes a long way.

Finally, we need our associations to do a lot better. I have been trying to help a school in Connecticut and have reached out for support from a regional trade association. I was told this: “My association serves the needs of 430 member companies from across six states. We are so busy trying to tend to the needs of our members, run our programs and services, and trying to deliver value to members and interest prospective members to join our association, that unfortunately, that leaves little time to meet the needs of high schoolers and post secondary students looking to enter the various graphic arts professions.” If this is what we get from our industry groups, then the members are truly losing out. Where do these people expect to get new blood? Why aren’t printing schools and printing teachers getting memberships at no charge? Can’t we see the forest for the trees?

Let’s get busy. We can ALL help. We don’t need to wait for the next big trade show; we can’t count our trade associations. What we need is do is meet online, person to person, one by one, and we need to start NOW. We have already waited too long.