NEXT TIME YOU’RE IN A SUPERMARKET TRY THIS Imagine every piece of print in the shop has vanished overnight. Not just the magazines and newspapers by the entrance – everything. The soup cans are blank silver cylinders. The cereal boxes are plain brown cardboard. You can’t tell the shampoo from the conditioner, the shower gel from the washing-up liquid, own-brand beans from own-brand custard. The special offer stickers are gone, the shelf edge labels are gone, the loyalty card leaflets are gone. You’d be standing in the middle of a shop full of thousands of identical grey boxes, completely unable to do your shop.
That’s the trick question we put to young people who tell us print is dying. At first they think we mean the magazine rack, or maybe the newspapers. Then, with a bit of prompting, it dawns on them: they wouldn’t know soup from pet food if it weren’t printed on the can. Point out the scale of it – every carrier bag, every till receipt, every price tag, the box their trainers came in, the instruction leaflet in the medicine packet, even the keys on the laptop they’re reading this on – and most of them go quiet for a second. Print isn’t a shrinking corner of the media world. It’s the wallpaper of everyday life, so complete and so constant that people stop seeing it at all.
That invisibility is exactly why print struggles to recruit. You can’t want to work in an industry you don’t know exists. Ask a sixteen-year-old what jobs there are in ‘print’ and most will guess at two: someone who designs things and someone who presses a button on a big machine. In reality, a single order – one box of leaflets, one run of packaging, one wedding invitation – passes through the hands of half a dozen different people with completely different skills, personalities and interests, before it lands on a doorstep. This is a guide to those people, and to the doors that might be open to you.
Being honest about the hurdles
It’s worth saying upfront: print isn’t always an easy industry to get excited about from the outside and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. Most print factories are on industrial estates, the kind of place with a retail park on one side and a distribution centre on the other, not always brilliantly served by buses or trains. If a firm still runs big litho presses, the factory floor can be genuinely loud – ear defenders, warning lights, forklifts moving pallets of paper the size of a fridge. It has historically been a male-dominated trade, especially on the press floor, and walking into that as, say, a young woman or as anyone who doesn’t see themselves reflected in the room, can feel daunting.
All of that is real and worth going in with your eyes open about. But it’s also only part of the picture. Plenty of modern print sites run mostly digital presses, which are quieter, cleaner and closer in feel to a big photocopier room than a Victorian factory. The industry, like most manufacturing sectors, knows it has a diversity problem and is actively trying to fix it – precisely because firms that only ever recruit from the same pool of people are the ones struggling hardest to fill vacancies. And crucially “working in print” doesn’t mean standing at a press. Many of the roles below happen in an office, at a screen, on the phone, or in a design studio – nowhere near the noise.
THE MANY DOORS IN: EIGHT ROLES IN A TYPICAL PRINT COMPANY
THE ORGANISER Every order starts somewhere, and in most modern print firms that’s a website enquiry, an email, or a phone call, not a person walking through the door. Someone has to take that order, check the details are right, log it on the system, chase up anything that’s missing, and make sure it’s scheduled in front of the right people at the right time. It’s a genuinely varied office job – part admin, part customer service, part detective work when a client’s brief doesn’t quite add up. It suits people who like things to be organised, who don’t mind picking up the phone, and who get satisfaction from a job done properly rather than a job done flashily.
THE PERSUADER Someone has to go out and win the work in the first place, and print sales is a much more interesting job than it sounds. You’re not selling a commodity off a shelf – you’re helping a client work out what they actually need, whether that’s a print run for a product launch, packaging for a new drinks brand, or signage for 40 shop branches, and then persuading them your company is the one to deliver it. Good print salespeople understand the product well enough to spot opportunities the client hasn’t thought of yet. It’s a role for people who like talking to people, who enjoy a bit of problem solving, and who don’t mind the occasional “no” on the way to a “yes”.
THE DESIGNER This is the door most young people already picture, but it’s bigger than they think. Graphic designers in print don’t just make things look nice – they create the artwork that will actually become the product: the packaging, the brochure, the label, the poster. That means learning to work properly in Adobe InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, understanding how colour actually behaves when it’s printed rather than glowing on a screen, and knowing the difference between a file that looks fine and a file that’s actually ready for a press. It’s a genuinely creative career, but one grounded in a craft – the same instinct that draws people to art and design courses, aimed at something that ends up as a real, physical object in someone’s hand.
THE GO-BETWEEN Between the client and the factory floor sits someone whose whole job is translation. A client will say they want their packaging to “pop on the shelf” or their brochure to “feel premium” – vague human phrases that someone then has to turn into specific decisions about paper stock, finish, colour and format. This liaison role is part account management, part project management, and entirely about communication: listening carefully to what a client actually wants (which isn’t always what they first say), and making sure everyone inside the business understands it too. It suits people who are good with others, who can hold several jobs in their head at once, and who like being the person who keeps everything on track.
THE MATERIALS EXPERT Not all paper is the same, and choosing the wrong stock can ruin an otherwise perfect job. Someone in the business needs to know that a glossy art paper will make photography sing but won’t take a pen easily; that an uncoated recycled stock feels more ‘authentic’ but prints colour less vibrantly; that packaging board needs a certain rigidity to survive a supply chain; and that the weight, finish and even grain direction of paper all affect how a finished product looks, feels and performs. This is a technical, detail oriented role for people who enjoy genuinely understanding how a material behaves – the print equivalent of a chemist or materials scientist, but one you can learn largely on the job.
THE PREPRESS DUDE For litho printing, nothing gets near a press until a plate has been made – a thin metal sheet, one for each colour, etched with the image that will eventually be inked and pressed onto paper. Platemaking today is done on precise digital ‘computer to plate’ equipment rather than by hand in a darkroom but it still demands real technical care. Getting it wrong means a print run comes out with colours out of register or an image that is subtly, expensively off. It’s a role that rewards precision and patience, and appeals to people who like working with technology and getting something exactly, provably right.
THE PRESS OPERATOR This is the role most people picture when they think ‘printer’ – but even here there are two quite different jobs. Litho press operators run the big, powerful machines that print enormous volumes at high speed and low cost per unit. It’s a skilled, physical, and yes, noisier job, involving loading paper stock the size of a table, managing ink and colour consistency, and keeping a machine worth hundreds of thousands of pounds running smoothly. Digital press operators work with equipment that’s closer to an industrial version of an office printer: quieter, more screen based, brilliant for shorter runs and personalised print, and increasingly where a lot of new investment in the industry is going. Both are technical, hands-on jobs for people who like machinery and problem solving, but they’re genuinely different working environments, and it’s worth asking a company which kind of press floor you’d actually be on.
THE FINISHER A freshly printed sheet isn’t a finished product – it’s a big flat piece of paper or board with several copies of the design printed on it. The finishing department is where it becomes the real thing. Guillotines cut sheets down to size; folding machines turn a flat sheet into a leaflet or a box; machines fold and glue cartons into shape; stitching or binding equipment turns pages into a booklet or brochure; and laminating or foiling adds the shine or texture a client asked for. It’s satisfying, tactile, mechanically minded work, ideal for people who like seeing a physical process through from a flat sheet to a finished object they can hold.
Following one job through the building
It’s easier to see how these roles connect if you follow a single order. Say a drinks brand wants boxes for a new product launch. It starts as an enquiry through the website, logged and scheduled by the organiser in the office. A salesperson has already been talking to the client for weeks, understanding the brief and agreeing a price. The studio manager sits down with the client’s rough ideas and works out exactly what ‘punchy and premium’ means in practical terms, then briefs the designer, who builds the artwork in Illustrator and InDesign, choosing colours and layouts that will actually reproduce well on press. The materials expert recommends a board stock that’s rigid enough for shelf life but takes a metallic ink well. Plates are made for each colour the job needs. The press operator – litho in this case, because the run is in the tens of thousands – loads the boards and runs the job, watching colour consistency sheet after sheet. From there the printed boards move to finishing, where they’re cut, creased, folded and glued into flatpacked cartons, ready to be shipped to the drinks brand’s own factory to be filled. One order. Seven or eight different people. Almost none of them touched a press and several of them never left a desk.
Which door is yours?
If you’re creative, there’s a design and artwork route that leads somewhere genuinely different from a purely digital design career – your work becomes a physical object, not just a screen. If you’re technically minded, there’s a path through platemaking, materials, or press operation that rewards precision and a fascination with how things work. If you like talking to people and solving problems on the fly, sales and client liaison roles are built for you. And if you’re simply well organised and want to learn a business from the ground up, the office and admin route is a genuine way in, with plenty of firms happy to train someone up and let them move sideways into other departments once they’ve found their feet.
The honest pitch to a sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old isn’t “come and stand at a printing press”. It is this: “Here is an entire, varied business with roles for people who like art, people who like machines, people who like talking and people who like getting things exactly right. There is no single typical day because the industry needs all of those people working together to get one box of leaflets out of the door.”
Getting your foot in the door
If any of this sounds interesting, you don’t need to already know exactly which door you want. The British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF) runs recognised apprenticeship routes into the industry, including the Level 3 Print Technician apprenticeship standard, which is designed to take someone with no print background through to a genuinely skilled, qualified role – earning while you learn rather than paying for a course first. Many print companies also take on school leavers directly into office, sales or junior design roles and train them from there.
The best starting point is usually the simplest one: ask a local print company for a short work experience placement or a look around the factory floor, so you can see for yourself which of these jobs actually appeals. Because from the outside most people never get the chance to see just how many doors there are.
Useful places to start your journey to a job in print
