The print skills gap — and how we close it

Print buying used to be a dedicated, specialist role. Today, that responsibility has shifted almost entirely onto marketing teams, curatorial staff and design partners — people who now manage print procurement alongside everything else, without the years of hands-on experience that used to come with the job.

That gap shows up in three ways: fewer opportunities to build practical experience (print is bought far less often than digital media), a retiring generation of production experts taking decades of troubleshooting knowledge with them, and online procurement portals that are fast but purely transactional — brilliant when the brief is right, unforgiving when it isn't.

The good news: buying print well was never really about technical press knowledge. It's about process control.

Our one-day training gives your team (up to 4 people) the practical skills to get the right result, every time:

• Taking the brief to production — translating a creative concept into a realistic production schedule, accounting for stock lead times, proofing rounds and finishing processes before anything goes to press

• Speaking the right language — using precise industry terminology so designers, marketing and the press room all share the same expectations on quality, colour and turnaround

• Managing supply chain logistics — from pre-flighting artwork to mapping delivery constraints and exhibition deadlines into the schedule from day one

As AI and online tools make buying print look simpler than ever, the parts that actually determine whether a job lands on time and on brief — a missed delivery slot, a flawed schedule, shifting stakeholder expectations — still need a person who knows what to ask for, and how to ask for it.