Meet Women in Print Alliance member Julie Shaffer, senior vice president of Content & Programs at Association for PRINT Technologies/WhatTheyThink and an Educator in the women in print community. She is the author of several technology-focused books, developer of training programs in premedia and digital printing labs, and has traveled extensively to conduct training seminars and manage technology-specific conferences.

In the Q&A below, Julie shares her “Aha!” moment when she knew print was the right field for her, offers her take on trends vs fads in technology education, and what the printing industry can do to attract younger women to the industry. Plus, she describes how she successfully navigated her most recent print education challenge: producing eleven 52-page magazines, in two languages, with every cover graphic unique (64K unique covers) over 11 days!

Thank you, Julie, for sharing your print education passion with the women in print community!

How and when did you enter or become associated with the printing industry? What was your “Aha!” moment when you knew print was the right field for you?
My earliest experience with printing plants was the newspaper plan where we pasted up our high school newspaper. It was a living museum, that had apparently stopped production one day, and the last paper printed was still on the rolls of the silent press, and the last line of metal type was still sitting in the Linotype machine. So I thought of it even back then as something dying.

When I was in college studying Journalism, we took a field trip to visit a large offset printing company. I vividly remember walking into that pressroom and being hit with that pressroom smell of ink, and solvent and paper and feeling pounding of the presses turning – it was so visceral and alive – and I thought, well this is something very interesting.

A few years later, after a short stint in advertising I decided to look into a job in printing and when I went for the interview we toured the pressroom and that whole experience hit me again. It was like coming home. And I’ve been in it ever since.

You’ve seen many trends in print education over the years. Which models of delivering training and education have lasted and which ones have been fads?
Print education can mean different things. I think some educational models work well for some learners and some tools that work better for others. Some models have fallen out of favor, not necessarily because they are a fad, but because other more cost-effective models evolved to take their place.

Let’s consider some different educational delivery tools. There’s hands-on education, of the kind used in apprenticeship programs or staff-based training in a print shop. For specific job training (i.e. feeder operation), hands-on training has to trump everything else. Certainly, some companies have sophisticated classroom training, or offer self-learning through online coursework or simulators, but in the end, it boils down to hands-on operational training.

Online training can take many forms too, from the simple webinar to sophisticated interactive coursework, to online training with a live instructor. So many people were forced to learn online (including all students K-university throughout the pandemic) there may be some exhaustion around the idea of online learning, but with advances in AI, where the system gets to know the student (personalized learning) and natural language processing, this will likely be a primarily mode of education in general, including our industry.

Gamification has been tossed around for some time and I’d call it the closest to a fad in education, but this too will be revolutionized through AI.

I will say I miss the days of hands-on training programs at the GATF/PIA headquarters, where people would come to immerse in a topic for 2-5 days. Students engaged in all aspects of many types of printing and production. But this sort of training is expensive to produce and to attend, so has fallen out of favor. But building and running these programs were really a highlight of my career.

On a scale of 1 – 10, one being not all concerned and 10 being hair on fire – how worried are you about the state of print and graphics communications programs (or lack thereof) in high schools? In two- and four-year colleges?
I don’t consider it “hair on fire” worry, although I’m feeling a tad singed, about the diminished number of programs at the high school level. While some states have kept these programs alive (Maryland comes to mind), the overall decline has been precipitous over a couple of decades. Talk to high school students and ask them what they know about the printing industry. You won’t hear many that have heard anything about it. It goes back to the expense of maintaining a program I believe.

As to post-secondary programs, there are certainly organizations that work to support these programs with scholarships (PGSF) and program accreditation (ACCGC). I am not sure we will go back to the days when universities had in-house printing facilities for students. I think we’re in an evolutionary process where what it means to have a degree in graphic communications may have less to do with having experience running a printing press, and more to do with understanding the business of print.

Recently you were on the team that produced the drupa daily – the official publication at the massive global drupa trade show held in Germany that educates and informs attendees each day. A different type of education, albeit, but necessary. What was that like?
Looking back now, I almost can’t believe we did what we did – produced eleven 52-page magazines, in two languages, with every cover graphic unique (64K unique covers) over 11 days. It was a feat. I spent most of 11 days sitting in the “war room” in a side corridor of the Messe daily project where we hammered away each day from early morning until we transmitted the interior pages to the printer each evening.

The cover was printed by HP on the show floor (a first in drupa history) and these covers were shipped to the company that printed the interior pages each night, stitched together and the finished magazines were sent back to the Messe by 7 am, where they were distributed to the bins in the Messe for that day.

As intense as it was on site, the project began many months before we got to Dusseldorf. We worked with a design firm, Bubble and Hatch, who developed the template for the magazine. There were over 220 stories in the drupa daily magazines, and we had about 120 of those pre-written, translated, and laid out in advance. So when we got to Germany, the number of onsite stories and translations were manageable.

Our translation partner was Zipcon Consulting, who were unique in that they are part of the printing industry and understood the vernacular of the industry in Germany. Overall this was an exhausting but awesome experience – never have I see a team of people come together and just do what was needed without a lot of discussion. It just got done.

Is the industry doing enough to attract young women to careers in print? Are companies doing enough to provide training and education support to help women advance in their print careers? What one thing can the industry do better?
While the ratio of students in the graphic communications industry now skews heavily to the female demographic, I’m not sure that means we’re doing a better job of attracting them. Talking to some of these students, I’ve come to understand that many imagined a career in graphic design and while in the program were drawn into the “print” side.

I don’t know that companies are specifically searching for women in the industry or have programs that are gender-based in any way. I think it can be very grass-roots. Like each of us women in the industry make an effort to, through social media, or local events, or conferences, reach out to other women to encourage and support and share how awesome it is to work in print!