Prepress employment is going away, and it’s being replaced by the content creation side. Not only are content creators doing more of the prepress part of the job, but automated systems are also replacing human beings in the workplace. Yes, a robot has taken my job.
Seeing this was kind of a shocker for me. Shortly after I posted this, Prepress Pilgrim started asking some pretty serious questions about my post. In a comment on the Prepress Pilgrim blog, Dr. Joe Webb pointed to his own article and data where he got the original numbers. I’m not sure why he says “Enjoy!” at the end of his comment. I don’t really “Enjoy!” reading about how our jobs are being done by someone else, at a lower wage and without our expertise. Hmm. For those who don’t know, Joe Webb is an economist and consultant for WhatTheyThink, a long running and widely read printing research firm, and the host for several industry specific blogs.
I am not an economist, but I have been researching employment trends and wages in prepress operator and manager positions for quite a while, in a professional capacity. As a prepress manager, I’ve frequently been in a position to hire and set wages. This data affects how I do my job, the availability of skilled workers, and budgeting for those people. For the length of my career, I have never known a time, until now, when I didn’t have to hire people for prepress. On the shop floor, positions were pretty stable. That is, press and bindery worker numbers, in our plant, remained the same over time. Prepress always seemed like a growth area.
It seems that wages and jobs in this occupation have literally imploded, starting some time around 2000 – 2001, in my neck of the woods. Webb wrote an interesting article in his blog about a year ago giving his take on this situation. In the first part of the article he describes in gory detail how at its peak in mid-1998, the printing industry had nearly 830,000 workers. Now (a year after the article was written) there are 512,500 total. As far as prepress technicians, Webb states:
At that time, there were 70,000 employees in prepress trade shops (separators, platemakers, and trade typographers). Today, there are 25,000 with most of them are in some high-level publishing workflow, with nary a sense of what platemaking, separating, or typography was or might have been.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics site, in 2008 there were 36,500 people employed in prepress in the U.S. That number is expected to drop by 14% – 25% in the next eight years. BLS predictions over the past ten years have been fairly conservative. Collapsing sales in printing and traditional ad media, in concert with a glut of “Graphic Design” graduates willing to work for low wages, and technological advancements which have promoted a “hands off” approach to the digital workflow (which has always been the realm of the prepress operator) lead me to believe that we are in the twilight of an era when prepress specialists added value to the business.
I’d love to hear comments from anyone reading this, are we optimistic or pessimistic, and what are we going to do next?
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2 Comments
Hi,
I’m kind of pessimistic right now. I worked as a pre-press professional for more than ten years up until Dec 2009. I was hopping to find some insight as to where these talented professionals are going for new careers. I spent a lot of money on a Bachelors degree in Printing Technology and right now it isn’t worth the paper its printed on.
Hi David,
Thanks for taking the time to read the blog. These are indeed sad times for those of us on the prepress side. Like you, I thought that getting a college degree and pursuing what has been an important and vital industry for the past 500 + years would be an excellent career choice. I think it’s interesting and fascinating. I have some aptitude for it. It’s frustrating to see the industry collapse in this way. The old business models aren’t working as well right now, and every year there’s another technology (like the iPad) which creates less of a need for printing. I think there are a lot of other reasons, too, which have conspired to put us out of business, and that is the awful truth. Outsourcing. Automation technology. Digital Printing.
I had a boss once, sales guy, whose fantasy was (and he told us this) that he could walk in, flip a switch in the morning, and “all the jobs would produce themselves”. Because he’s the guy who writes the check for the equipment, the vendors have been working diligently to make that happen. I will probably write a post about this, but I really don’t want to focus on negative things. All I can say is, I am hoping to take my experience in the direction the market wants, and that would be electronic publishing: web development mainly, or other delivery media, like smart phones, or the aforementioned iPad? One of the ideas for having this blog is to experiment in that world. Right now I find myself in a quick copy in-plant, doing short run books and teaching users how to set up files in word so they will run. I am lucky, I got a vaguely related job, and I’m working hard to move into electronic publishing by going BACK to college to get ANOTHER degree in Computer Science.
Hopefully as the economy recovers, there will be a backlash against electronic media, but I’m afraid that since most people are already down the electronic road they won’t be easily pulled back to printing.