Industry Overview
The UK printing industry is a vibrant and essential part of the UK economy, serving all parts of the business and consumer market – central and local government, financial services, retailing, distribution, travel and tourism and the manufacturing industry. Providing an important medium for education, information as well as entertainment, the demand for its products is largely derived from the level of activity in the economy at large. The industry produces a wide and varied spectrum of products ranging from the obvious – newspapers, books and magazines to the less obvious – money, passports, signage and printed packaging. The diversity of its products and fragmented nature of its markets is reflected in the structure of this industry.
The Printing industry comprises just over 27,000 UK workplaces, employing around 162,000 employees.
Over 95% of the industry employs fewer than 50 employees; around 85 employing less than 10.
More than 90% of the total workforce is based in England.
Proskills works with employers from the Printing Industry to help businesses improve their productivity and competitiveness through skills training. Extensive research and comprehensive employer consultation has identified a need to upskill current and future workforces to enable businesses in this industry to address the challenges they currently face. In particular as the current economic climate forces many businesses to make staff cut backs, there is an increasing need for the remaining workforce to multi-skill.
Skills training is required to help business address the following:
- Skills shortages are particularly prevalent among front line staff, technical staff as well at managerial and supervisory level
- To help businesses ride the storm of the current economic climate and credit crunch, particularly with respect to a drop in the demand for products in an industry where the business cycle is closely linked to the level of economic activity
- The need to meet constantly changing consumer demands and preferences
- To support legislation compliance on Health and Safety as well as Environmental Management
- To improve efficiencies by tightening up processes to tackle the issue of rising energy costs and the need for more energy-efficient machinery and processes
- To drive business performance improvements to increase national and global competitiveness
- To keep up with technological advances
- To improve current low capacity utilisation which in turn means declining profitability, driven primarily by the acquisition of new technologies without adequate adaptation of business planning to their higher capacities. Other factors underlying unused capacity include over-investment in new equipment, seasonal fluctuation in print orders and retention of old equipment