Hopping Aboard the Training Train
This article originally appeared in the March 2023 issue of PS Magazine.
It’s been about a year since the COVID-19 pandemic upended business operations worldwide and forced companies in all industries, including printed product manufacturing and distribution, to adapt to an environment in which company survival — not just prosperity — was uncertain.
Looking back, ask yourself: Were you prepared?
And thinking about the state of your business today, ask yourself: What could I have done differently? How can I ensure my company — whether it’s a distributorship, manufacturer or supplier — and my employees are set up to succeed during not only disruptive events but every day?
Among the answers to all these questions is to conduct multifaceted training regularly across your organization.
In a recent blog post, Susmita Sarma, a digital marketer at professional development consultancy Vantage Circle, describes training as “the method of improving the employees’ talents, abilities and expertise to perform specific work,” adding that “it enhances the thought process, which contributes to better workplace results.” This is true during times of “routine operations” and when external factors make them more challenging.
No one would say that employee training is not essential for enterprises to grow and thrive. However, few would say even their best training-related endeavors are up to speed and optimized to boost profits, especially as adversities such as the pandemic change how your business gets done. Urgent needs and obligations understandably get addressed first.
However, like your customers, your companies are always evolving to address market changes and keep a competitive edge. And ongoing training, both broad-based and industry-specific, is vital to ensure your employees and teams can enable you to do those things well.
Do your people have first-class seats on the training train to success?
Adapting and Building Through Training
Amid technological advances and evolutions of print industry operations and strategies, companies and their employees must adapt and bolster their knowledge, skills and abilities. Actively engaging employees in relevant and consistent training helps to boost individual and collective performance and, ultimately, the bottom line.
Christine Abunassar, CEO of ThinkB!G.LearnSmart (thinkbiglearnsmart.com), a Columbia, Maryland-based learning and development agency, says expecting employees to proactively educate and train themselves on everything from Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud applications to print industry-specific tools is shortsighted.
“We believe in following official curricula and industry standards on how to best use critical technologies,” Abunassar says. “So, the training we deliver for all clients is focused on ways to use technology most efficiently based on industry best practices. The ‘I taught myself’ approach takes much longer than learning through formal training.”
Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, once said that, “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”
Abunassar, whose company trains, consults and builds e-learning tools like Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline for government and commercial clients worldwide, agrees that skilled training is especially vital in the print industry as digital creation, delivery and distribution technologies are the tools of this trade.
“There is a heightened awareness that we have a big variance in our workforce development and the skills people need,” she says. “Organizations need their people to have solid foundational knowledge to be highly productive. Especially today, people need to work smart. Time can never be returned. So, having skilled training is essential. It’s the only way to do more with less.”
Training programs help improve the knowledge and skills of employees to align with accelerating production and growth within the print industry. Among print professionals, adapting to change is nothing new, but it’s important to know that training has evolved to become more customized, covering a variety of skills, applications and technologies that are increasingly integral to print business operations.
“If you have a highly skilled individual who knows how to use Adobe InDesign, for example, they’re going to produce better, faster and more accurately,” says Abunassar, whose company is an Adobe and Microsoft Authorized Training Center. “It’s about skills and the training to empower consistent quality delivery, efficiency and repeatable process.”
The Many Benefits of Training
When employees undergo training, it improves their skills and knowledge of the jobs they hold and builds confidence in their abilities. Ultimately, this will improve their performance and enable them to work more efficiently and effectively.
Training also drives uniformity of work processes, standardizing them among employees and keeping them on the same page.
“In the print industry, everyone needs to speak the same digital language,” Abunassar says. “Looking at it from that vantage point, we help clients identify and target gaps related to productivity. Where’s the problem? Is it that you’ve rolled out some new technology within the organization, like Adobe Acrobat Pro, and you need to get everyone on-ramped to use it? Or do you have new hires getting out of school and are trying to get them the foundational technology skills for a career path? Or is it that you have a bunch of people with 10, 15 or 20-plus years in the print industry who need to ramp up on technology?”
Training also boosts employee morale, as many feel more confident and supported when training is part of one’s work and not something “extra” they have to do. In turn, relevant and effective training empowers them to do their best work, and that can minimize turnover as employees feel increasingly valued.
“Empowering the workforce: That’s our mission at ThinkB!G,” Abunassar says. “This isn’t only by industry; it’s by individual. Training and certifying them is a big differentiator within an organization to build employees’ competencies and identify them through industry certification. These are future champions in a company who are most skilled and might be the next in line to take on more responsibility. Helping employees build their skills empowers them to be high-producing leaders for the organization.”
Continuous Training and Competitive Advantage
In her blog post, Sarma at Vantage Circle writes, “To reap the best benefits, your employee training system should be a continuous and never-ending process.”
Joe Rickard, president of Intellective Solutions (intellectives.com), a Tuxedo Park, New York-based sales training and consultancy that works with printing, manufacturing and technology firms, agrees with Sarma’s assessment. Some distributors who offer training say it’s typically organized as a single event — a workshop session here, a half-day seminar there — and that is not as impactful as ongoing training and learning.
“Companies that make training a key element of their overall objectives are far better off than ones that conduct what I like to call ‘drive-by training,’” Rickard says. “A big problem many print firms face is they view training as something that just stands alone rather than integrating it with their overall business objectives, marketing plans, compensation strategies and the like.”
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, once said that, “An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.”
Abunassar agrees, asserting that continuous, relevant and timely training is essential to have an organization with a competitive advantage within the print industry, among others.
“It’s important to have a leadership culture that communicates that you have to be masters of the trade,” she says. “And the only way to do to that is to constantly retool and reskill with the latest technology as it’s changing so rapidly. The integration of multiple technologies is another critical factor in production. Training for integrating with other applications is customized and mission-critical to create competitive advantage with unique and efficient solutions for clients.”
Abunassar adds, “An organization can’t claim to be innovative or state-of-the-art and then not invest in training its team constantly. People are part of your product line, and that quality is what you’re delivering to clients.”
Customer valuation is an ancillary benefit of employee training that some might overlook, but that pride in one’s work affects the bottom line. When employees engage in consistent, ongoing training, it improves their job skills and facilitates more professional and productive work. Customers ultimately will see the impact of elevated service, helping you retain and grow your business.
According to Rickard, it all comes down to effective training.
Types of Training
Some companies in the print industry have in-house training programs, while others bring in consultants or organizations such as ThinkB!G, which offers on-site and live online training, with the latter becoming even more prominent during the pandemic. Training is available through its public calendar of classes and custom private classes for individuals, teams and entire organizations, and its SmartPass® Learning Licenses provide bulk discounts.
Abunassar says her company’s Virtual Online Live Training (VOLTTM) Service is trending as the preferred method of training.
“With so many organizations working virtually during the pandemic, we were able to pivot immediately to transition our clients to VOLT™, with expanded direct instructor oversight of each student’s computer screen for immediate live support while training,” Abunassar says. “The adoption has been tremendous.”
Another unique offering from Abunassar’s company is Project Based Training®, which enables its clients to “learn while they build” by incorporating their current projects as part of the learning. For example, if you need to create a brochure for your organization using Adobe InDesign, you can sign up for Project Based Training®, during which an Adobe Senior Certified Instructor and Designer will work with you on topics specific to your project needs to build your brochure.
Abunassar says this training program mitigates concerns that time spent in training could take employees away from important work they need to do.
“Production doesn’t have to stop when you get training; in fact, it actually brings the two together, creating an efficiency in learning,” she says. “We bring in real project files like an organization’s Excel spreadsheet that they use day in and day out, and we tie those two together.
Abunassar adds, “I was just on the phone with someone, and they need to train 20 people on Excel. Their people’s skills are ‘all over the place’ because they were all essentially self-taught on it,” so Project Based Learning® likely would be a good option for that group.
Print Industry-Specific Training
For print manufacturers, distributors and suppliers, training specifically applicable to the industry is important, as well. A major area of change in recent years, Abunassar says, is the shift to all things digital and the need to design print pieces only one time for print and digital use.
“Our mantra is, ‘Design Once, Deliver Many.’ — the idea that you’re designing your document to be able to print it and put it on the web,” she says. “The ‘Design Once, Deliver Many.’ concept makes training even more important because you can’t have dissimilarities in production. So, people are not just learning how to design a piece to have it printed; they also need to plan for digital output. The training has also become more critical due to the need for standardization within organizations as it affects so many departmental units, with marketing, web, print and social media all collaborating on content.”
Industry-specific training also enables employees to perform varied work.
“The beauty of training in this digital content industry is that professionals can repurpose themselves across different job functions, and that’s a huge benefit to an organization,” she says.
Of course, PSDA offers its members a plethora of tailored education — in-person and online — to help them succeed in this ever-changing industry. Among PSDA’s newest educational programs is Print Basics, which is designed for any employee of a member company wanting to learn more about print and printed products. Employees new to the industry or others who want an opportunity to revisit common topics can learn about everything from types of printing to print categories, specifications and applications.
Sandra Moffitt Adams, sales consultant at Phoenix-based commercial printer Specialized Office Systems (sossystems.com), participated in the Print Basics program in fall 2020. She tells PS Magazine that, as a promotional products salesperson for the past 30 years, she had always been somewhat intimidated by trying to sell print because it seemed so complicated. Attending Print Basics helped her address that challenge.
“Watching each presentation really opened my eyes about how huge the print industry is,” Adams says. “The key is to ask the customer the right questions. It was eye-opening to realize that my promotional customers are probably buying print from someone else, so why not me?”
Adams adds that speakers in the Print Basics program were very informative and made each aspect of the print industry they covered easy to understand.
“Each speaker was knowledgeable and interesting to listen to,” she says. “This program was so helpful to me because my company, LOGO Expressions, was recently acquired by Specialized Office Systems, which offers a lot of print.”
Overall, she says, “It was nice to get an overview of the print industry and know that the people at Specialized are experts and able to answer any questions I might have.
John Delavan is a Pennsylvania-based contributing writer and a former Brand Chain staff member.