中文Every conversation about the labour shortage in print sounds the same. Nobody wants to work in manufacturing anymore. Young people don’t understand the industry. The schools stopped teaching it. We tried a jobs fair once and nobody came.
Notice what is missing from all of that. Anyone actually asking the people already in the building what they think.
Girls Who Print just did exactly that, and released the results as its 2026 Industry Insights Report — examining the experiences, priorities and perspectives of women working across the global print and graphic communications industry.
Where the data came from
This is not a vibes-based think piece. The report draws on two separate streams:
- 210 responses to the 2025-2026 Girls Who Print Survey
- Recurring themes identified across 242 applications to the Girls Who Print Mentorship Program
That second source is the sneaky-good one, and it is worth pausing on. Survey responses tell you what people say when someone asks them a question. Mentorship applications tell you what people write when they are asking for help — unprompted, in their own words, about what they are actually stuck on. When 242 of those applications keep circling the same handful of problems, that is not opinion. That is a pattern.
Together they cover ten Industry Insights spanning mentorship, technology, leadership, entrepreneurship, workforce development, career advancement, and the emerging opportunities women see across the sector.
What Deborah Corn said about it
Deborah Corn, Executive Director of Girls Who Print, framed the purpose plainly:
“Women across the industry shared their experiences, perspectives, and priorities. The insights revealed in this report will help shape Girls Who Print programs, resources, and initiatives that address the needs identified across our global network while also providing valuable perspective for the industry.”
Note that last clause — “valuable perspective for the industry.” This report is not positioned as an internal document for one community. It is being handed to everyone else as free market research.
The five findings, and why each one stings
The report highlights five headline findings. Individually they sound reasonable. Read together, they describe a set of problems most print businesses are actively creating for themselves.
1. Mentorship has become a strategic tool for retaining talent.
Not a feel-good extra. Not an HR box to tick. A retention tool. Which means the reverse is also true: no mentorship, more people walking out. If you have ever watched a good production coordinator leave for a competitor and told yourself it was about money, this finding is asking you to consider that it might have been about having nobody to learn from.
2. Technology fluency is becoming a leadership differentiator.
The path to running things now runs through understanding the systems. Workflow software, data, automation, AI tooling. This is genuinely useful news for anyone building a career, because technology fluency is learnable in a way that decades of shop-floor seniority is not. It is also a warning to leaders who have quietly outsourced all their technical understanding to “the IT guy.”
3. Clear career pathways are essential to attracting new talent.
Here is the one that should embarrass most of us. The industry complains endlessly that nobody wants these jobs, while being largely unable to describe what the job becomes in five years. “You’d start on the finishing line and, you know, see how it goes” is not a career pathway. It is a shrug. People will not bet their twenties on a shrug.
4. More women are building businesses and pursuing entrepreneurship.
This one cuts two ways. Genuinely exciting — new companies, new services, new energy in a sector that badly needs it. But also worth sitting with uncomfortably: some portion of entrepreneurship is people who could not get where they wanted to go inside an existing company and decided to build their own instead. Every founder in that category is someone an employer failed to promote.
5. Respondents identified emerging opportunities across the industry.
The people doing the work can see where the growth is. Whether anyone in the boardroom is asking them is another question entirely.
It’s free, which removes your last excuse
The report was made possible through support from Girls Who Print members and sponsors, and it is being shared at no cost as a resource for employers, educators, associations, business leaders and industry professionals working on recruitment, retention, leadership development and workforce development.
Free. No paywall, no membership requirement, no sales call attached.
Think about how much a consulting firm would charge to survey 210 industry professionals and analyse 242 development applications for you. Then consider that this is sitting there for the cost of filling in a download form.
You can get it here: Download the 2026 Industry Insights Report. More on Girls Who Print, its membership and sponsorship offerings, and upcoming events is at girlswhoprint.org.
What to actually do with it
Reports like this die in inboxes. So here is the practical version.
Read it, then pick the one finding that made you wince, because that is the one that applies to you. If it was career pathways, sit down this month and write out — on actual paper — what progression looks like for each role in your shop. Not a promise, just a map. If you cannot fill it in, you have found your recruitment problem.
If it was mentorship, understand that formal programmes are not the only option. Pairing a five-year employee with a five-month employee for a standing half-hour every fortnight costs nothing and solves an enormous amount.
And if it was the entrepreneurship finding, go and have a genuinely honest conversation with your best mid-career people about where they think they are heading. You may not enjoy the answer. You will be a lot happier hearing it now than reading it in a resignation letter.
Two hundred and ten people told this industry what is wrong. The least anyone can do is read it before the next time they complain that nobody wants to work in print.
Source: Press release from Girls Who Print, published by WhatTheyThink, 26 August 2026 — “Girls Who Print Releases 2026 Industry Insights Report”
