The Skills Cliff: You Can Own the Best Print Press in the Factory and Still Have No One to Start It

Let me complain about something for a minute.

And to my friends in the printing industry, please do not get annoyed with me just yet.

There is one risk in printing that I think we do not talk about enough.

It is not the price of machines. It is not raw materials. It is not even competition.

It is people.

A printing company can own a brand-new press, have plenty of capacity, and hold every certification a customer asks for.

But if the people who really know how to run that press start retiring, and nobody is ready to replace them, all of that equipment starts to mean a lot less.

So when companies choose a print supplier today, I think there is one more question worth asking:

Will this supplier still have the people to run these machines properly five years from now?

Germany is already seeing the problem

Germany is one of the strongest printing and machinery markets in the world, so it is a useful place to look.

In a 2025 survey of German printing and media companies, 56 percent said they were still struggling with skilled-worker shortages.

At the same time, many apprenticeship positions were left empty. In printing, 26 percent went unfilled. In print finishing, it was 43 percent.

The longer-term trend is even clearer. In 2014, Germany had 4,985 new apprenticeship contracts across six major printing and media jobs. By 2025, that number had dropped to 2,463.

That is roughly half.

Even HEIDELBERG talks openly about labour shortages. One reason new presses are becoming more automated is simple: printers are having a harder time finding enough skilled people to run them.

That tells you something.

This is no longer just an HR problem. It is starting to shape the machines themselves.

The real problem is the knowledge that leaves with people

The difficult part is not just replacing a person.

It is replacing what that person knows.

Anyone who has spent time around a printing press will understand this.

A good operator can often hear something is wrong before the machine gives an alarm.

He knows when a material is starting to behave differently.

He knows that the manual says one thing, but this particular job needs a slightly different setting.

These things are hard to teach from a textbook.

And a lot of them are never written down.

That is why I always come back to this:

You can buy another press. You cannot buy thirty years of experience.

A factory can have one brilliant senior technician, but if nobody younger is learning from him, that factory still has a problem.

The real challenge is not only hiring good people.

It is passing knowledge from one generation to the next.

Thailand may have an even harder time

It is easy for us in Thailand to look at Germany and think, “That is a European problem.”

I do not think it is.

Thailand is ageing quickly, the birth rate is very low, and vocational workers are already difficult to find.

At the same time, most factories are not yet highly automated.

depa's 2024 Digital Density Survey found that 70 percent of the industrial companies it surveyed were still around Industry 2.0 level.

So we are stuck in an awkward middle.

We have fewer young people entering manufacturing.

We have experienced workers getting older.

And we have newer, more complicated machines coming into factories.

Automation will help, of course. But for most companies, it will not happen fast enough to completely replace skilled people.

That gap is where I think the risk is.

Buyers may need to look beyond the machine list

For years, print buyers have asked very reasonable questions.

What machines do you have?

How many colours?

How fast can you print?

What is your capacity?

Those questions still matter.

But I think the next set of questions will become just as important.

Who actually knows how to run those machines?

Who fixes the difficult problems?

What happens when that person retires?

Is someone younger already learning from them?

Because a printing company is not just a room full of equipment.

Anyone with enough money can buy a press.

A competitor can buy the same inspection system, the same software, and even the same materials.

What is much harder to copy is a team of people who know how to make everything work together.

That takes years.

This is the part that matters to me at COPACK

COPACK has been printing in Thailand since 1979.

Over that time, the machines have changed a lot. We started with screen printing, then added letterpress, offset, digital printing, inspection systems, and more automation.

The people had to keep changing with the machines.

For me, the important thing is not simply having employees who stay for a long time.

It is making sure their knowledge does not stay only with them.

How they judge colour.

How they set up a difficult job.

How they know when a machine is starting to behave strangely.

How they prevent a small problem from becoming a bad production run.

Those small things are part of the real value of a factory.

And they need to be passed on.

We are still working on this, like every serious manufacturer probably is.

But I am becoming more convinced that over the next decade, this may matter just as much as the next machine we buy.

You can own the best press in the factory.

The real question is whether you will still have someone who really knows how to run it.