What will you be discussing at your seminar?
The seminar is called ‘The Challenges Ahead’ – the industry as we know is in transformation, and as any industry or business transforms, they will be confronted by challenges. The panel has some great people from great printing businesses. I will be there from an industry perspective, with a focus on the training and skills needed.
Why should visitors attend the seminar?
At every trade show, there are opportunities to both look at the technology your business will use but also seminars to provide some context for that technology, to help you own development and your own away of thinking.
You joined the Printing Industries Association of Australia from PrintNZ last year – how has it been so far?
It was six months last week. I still can’t ‘speak Aussie’ but I do have an AFL team – I’m a St Kilda fan because I live into the area. Workwise, the focus has been around the registered training organisation (RTO) that the association has purchased. That now sits there as a strategic asset for the industry. We will announce a new partner for the RTO at PacPrint.
A lot of my focus over the past two to three months has been on Future Print, a major Federally funded project looking at reforming our apprenticeships. If we want the right skilled people we need to get behind the project and I will be calling on industry at the seminar to do that.
Tell us about any recent print campaign that made an impact on you?
It’s a campaign that is still running in New Zealand, the ‘Print Part of Life’ campaign. It is aimed at getting people to realise that print is part of your life every day.
We must stop apologising for it, and celebrate everything we do to help business and the economy. The bad things that happen in our industry get a lot of press time in the trade media but every day a courier will put a box down on thousands of our customers’ reception desks and a person receiving that will say, ‘Yay, there’s our new flyer our new packaging or our new business card’. That’s a magic that our industry puts into the economy every day.
Name one thing to make people proud and optimistic about working in print
It goes back to what I just said. Every single day, our industry supports every other business in the economy.
There is no business in our economy that operates without our industry behind them, from the sign on the door to the new packaging to the business card.
That is the magic of what our industry does and you forget about that magic at your peril.
[Related: More PacPrint news]
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