中文Ask a 25-year-old what they picture when you say “print,” and you will get a remarkably consistent answer: newspapers, catalogues, something their parents subscribed to, something in decline. They are not being rude. They are repeating a story the industry wrote for itself and then forgot to update — and that forgotten story is now the single biggest threat to the sector’s future workforce, more dangerous than any single technology shift because it hollows out the people who would run the technology.
Alec Couckuyt, a business strategist who has spent a career watching this play out, calls it the identity problem — and it is the real reason the print sector cannot hire. You cannot recruit effectively to an industry that has not decided what it is. Walk into a modern print facility and you will find sophisticated colour management, AI-assisted workflows, robotics, variable-data engines and real-time production analytics. The output is physical, but the intelligence behind it is thoroughly digital. This is not ink on paper; it is communications infrastructure that sits at the intersection of technology, brand, data and media.
The tragedy is that almost nobody outside the trade knows it. Print complements digital rather than competing with it: direct mail with embedded QR codes, packaging carrying augmented-reality triggers, labels streaming supply-chain data, wide-format graphics anchoring omnichannel retail. These are attractive, future-facing propositions. The industry simply has not packaged them that way, so the talented 25-year-old keeps walking toward the software startup down the street, convinced print is where careers go to retire rather than begin.
Meanwhile, the people who built this know-how are walking out the door for good. The offset press operator with 30 years of colour instinct, the bindery specialist who could diagnose a folding fault by ear, the prepress veteran who knew exactly how a file would behave on a specific press — they are retiring, and taking irreplaceable knowledge with them. The trade schools and apprenticeships that once refilled the talent pond have largely disappeared, and the ones still teaching produce graduates in numbers that bear no relationship to demand. The pond is small, ageing, and no longer being stocked, and nobody is quietly hoping that fixes itself.
Couckuyt’s argument is that the answer is not to recruit harder from the same shrinking pool. It is to find a bigger body of water. The wave of consolidation and convergence reshaping print is a business-transformation challenge as much as a technology one, and it needs people who can manage complexity, lead change and think cross-functionally. That profile does not only live on press floors — it lives in engineering faculties, business schools and adjacent industries. There is a generation of talented people who would find print genuinely compelling if they knew what it actually was: sophisticated technology, tangible output, brand impact at scale, and a business environment undergoing rapid transformation.
He also makes a sharper point that bosses ignore at their peril: talent is a strategic decision that must come before strategy execution, not after it. Leaders pour money into technology and automation roadmaps, then assume the right people will somehow materialise. They rarely do. The human-capital strategy has to sit upstream of everything else, because the cleverest press in the world earns nothing if nobody can run it, and the best automation still needs someone who understands what it is automating.
So what can a shop actually do? Three moves. One: rewrite the job ad — stop listing “press operator” and start describing the robotics, data and colour science the role actually uses, so it reads like a modern engineering job. Two: partner with an engineering or design faculty on a project, not a career fair, so students meet the real work and see the technology instead of the stereotype. Three: capture the retiring experts’ knowledge in video and manuals before they leave, because that institutional memory is the asset you cannot rebuy once it walks out. None of these is expensive; all of them are overdue.
The obligation, Couckuyt writes, is to the craftspeople who built the industry. The most meaningful way to honour them is to ensure there is a next generation capable of carrying it forward. The technology is racing ahead. The business models are getting more complex. The only variable still lagging — and the one entirely within the industry’s control to fix — is how it tells its own story to the people it needs. Fix that, and the talent pond starts filling again.
The uncomfortable truth is that the industry has been outsourcing its own story for decades and then wondering why the talent pond shrank. Fixing it does not require a national advertising campaign; it requires a thousand small, honest conversations — at a university lab, on a factory tour, in a rewritten job advert. Every shop that shows a curious young engineer what modern print actually is plants a seed the whole sector will eventually harvest, and the shops that start first will have first pick of the people everyone else is still complaining they cannot find.
Source: American Printer / Printer2Printer (www.americanprinter.com)
