Press Award: Press Operator U.
by John Bryan
Seeking qualified individuals with experience operating Goss Metro offset presses. Must be quality conscious and highly motivated. Must be well versed in color printing Send resume...
"There
was a day when you'd never see a [pressman-wanted] ad," says Wayne Bean,
vice president of operations for Tucson Newspapers. "Now the papers are
full of ads seeking pressmen."
That meant slim pickings for some newspapers, which in turn meant reaching all too often to the bottom of the barrel.
"We have had to take people from outside, and we've found they bring bad work habits with them," Bean says. He recalled one man who had moved to Tucson from the West Coast and was looking for part-time work. "We started him in the reel room, and he lasted one day before he quit. He told us, 'You guys work too hard,'" Bean says.
Experiences like that started Bean and his pressroom managers, John Lundgren and Tom Walter, thinking about getting out of the hiring market and growing their own expertise instead.
The result is a program that combines classroom training with the hands-on work of a traditional press apprenticeship. The new approach won the 1998 TechNews Best Practices Award for press.
Tucson has had a pressroom training program since 1978, but what sets this one apart is the classroom component. Lundgren and Walter reorganized the old program into a curriculum for entry-level candidates. Before long, they whipped the class work and a custom textbook/guidebook into shape, and Tucson Newspapers pressroom school was in session.
"We just came up with a philosophy of growing our own here, of teaching them right from the beginning," Lundgren says. "It's really starting to pay off.
Along with the new course work comes accountability, and measurement both by work evaluation and an oral exam, Lundgren says. "For years, we just would arbitrarily move them through the four-year apprenticeship process. But now, if you don't pass the tests, you don't graduate to the next level."
And
that costs the student money-if you pass the course work, you'll get a 5 percent
raise every six months, Bean says. If you fail, you're held back until you do
pass.
These aren't pushover questions, either. In addition to technical issues, students have to know safety rules, company policy, and ink and paper consumption, and that's just at the beginning level. By the third year, press operators are expected to not only know technical details like the name of the No. 48 cylinder, but also how long it should take to develop an on-the-spot contingency plan in case of massive press failure.
Clearly,
the word about the training program is getting around. Bean says The
Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., sent some people to see how the Tucson course
plan could fit into their operation. Bean says so far, four press operators have
graduated from the class and apprentice program to journeyman status, and
another 13 are in the pipeline.
All of which means Tucson finally can concentrate on running presses rather than want ads.