On The Shop Floor Peaking, troughing, staffing, training…
There is one thing that we have never been able to iron out, which I think is a common problem in our industry. The inevitable winter dip and the wider effect it has on staffing and training. Arron Harnden of Shirtworks explains further.
F
rom December through to February there seems to be less interest in buying screen printed or embroidered clothing and the almost impossible to manage summer peaks drop rapidly into sleepier winter troughs. The effect of this annual dip forces us to focus on managing costs carefully at this time, and unfortunately this means adopting a staff plan that involves expansion and contraction to deal with the drop in winter revenues.
Get up to speed Screen printing and embroidery production require skills that cannot be learned overnight. A good deal of time and patience is invested into newbies to get them up to speed and to a level where they can contribute to the fast pace of production without causing expensive mistakes. They need to be watched like a hawk,
their work checked and then checked again. This is a burden to the trainer who is most likely wrestling with their own production problems and deadlines. The distracted trainer creates a variable experience for each student because there is often no time to formalise and structure training in a logical, linear way; they are forced to coach on the run. It is an annually repetitive burden that could be alleviated if the formal education system recognised screen printing and embroidery as a possible career path for practically minded students who did not want to enter into the protracted and expensive system of academic higher education. Germany, Poland and Australia are just some of the more enlightened countries that take screen printing seriously and
Training the screen man
produce energetic college graduates to fill the ranks.
Much needed skills There are thousands of businesses in
the UK who could put keen young minds into paid summer work, augmenting their studies, or into a job as soon as they graduate if they were trained to have the skills that we need in the screen print industry. On paper, it does appear possible to gain
an NVQ/SVQ in printing, but finding a local college which is able to provide the training and equipment required to gain the qualification seems impossible.
Screen printing and
embroidery production require skills that cannot be learned overnight.
This is not surprising, as all colleges are commercial interests requiring bums on seats. It makes more financial sense to fill a room with 40 computer terminals to provide a training course, than it does to fill a large classroom with carousels and dyers.
In-house training from scratch is therefore inevitable. There are three ways to get someone up
to speed: 1) Make it up as you go along, training your newbies while on the job, accept that their mistakes will cost you time and money and their training experience is fractal and disjointed. 2) Find time to develop an in-house
training document, or apply to become an apprenticeship provider and accept that you will have a mountain of red tape, paper work, box ticking and inspections to attend to just to get yourself a cheap young blood into the workforce. 3) Cherry-pick from the NVQ level 2 and level 3 printing syllabus and give it to your production managers as their framework guide to formal training, along with your own in house training material. The following would be pertinent to the
newbie screen printer: ● Unit 201 – Maintain health and safety within a print related working environment.
● Unit 203 – Knowledge of the organisations printing processes and related information.
● Unit 204 – Keep equipment clean and in working order for use in the printing industry.
● Unit 310 – Machine printing (screen). If a training framework exists then you reduce variability, develop standard operating procedures and cognitive synchronicity. If a training framework exists you reduce errors, re-dos and financial loss. If a training framework exists you create
a culture with higher quality expectations and output. Once the newbie has reached the point where the training wheels can come off, they can be left to run wild and free through your workshop during the busy spring, summer and autumn periods. The shame of it all for us as a business is that the sleepy trough looms on the horizon, and we are destined to repeat the training exercise again and again and again. The real shame is that we lose one or
two good people that we have spent time and sometimes painful effort training, as we are forced to contract the workforce each winter. The really real shame of it all is that even while I write these glittering words, I know that we often fail to implement training in a formal and structured manor, instead relying on the make do and get by methods that a frenetic workshop dictates. If only I could send them to screen printing bootcamp or find a winter business to buy…
| 82 | April 2017
www.printwearandpromotion.co.uk
● Unit 212 – Prepare stencils for printing. ● Unit 214 – Prepare inks and coatings for printing.
● Unit 205 – Set up and run machinery within the print industry.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84