It’s child play

I have always maintained that the path to success is in providing the broadest and best service possible to existing customers. By taking part in regular, effective training programmes, sign-makers should be able to extend the range of applications they can offer to customers, thereby increasing revenue and profit. However, how can you ensure the training you have is relevant and of sufficient quality to add to your skills set?

Training is among the best investments a sign company—or any business for that matter—can make. In an age where technology is driving the cost of entry into the industry lower, and so encouraging the rise of competition, training offers measurable returns on any investment made in it whether monetary or time-based.

A well trained business which operates upon sound design foundations and which is in a position to extract optimum performance from its hardware, will, inevitably, produce more attractive results than a business which approaches things in an empirical fashion, by ‘learning as it goes’.

Properly educated, a business makes better decisions and better decisions help make more money. Something seemingly as grounded as specifying a material with properties appropriate to the needs of a particular job or that works in an entirely predictable fashion could be argued to be something only experience teaches. Many manufacturers, though, put learning resources on their websites and they’re worth seeking out as a little learning can return an immediate payback.

Some training is regarded, universally, as essential. Nobody would install a new wide-format printer and begin pouring alien liquids into it or pressing buttons to see what might happen. The consequences of doing so would be immediate, probably spectacular, and definitely expensive. That’s obvious.

O Factoid: In 2011, it was estimated that about $35.6bn (£20.8bn) was spent on self-paced eLearning across the globe. Today, e-Learning is a $56.2bn (£32.8bn) industry, and it is going to double by 2015. O

The consequences of experimenting with an equally complex system, such as ‘a business’ may not be so immediate or obvious. However, the out-come over time will be even more expensive whether in terms of lost sales opportunities or greatly increased costs thanks to failure of the product produced.

It’s a wrap

The need for training in the practical areas of sign and graphics production has become more evident in recent years thanks, in part, to the advent of specialisations such as vehicle wrap-ping. Traditional cut, weed and apply methods of sign production could be conveniently distilled to words and the skills handed from one practitioner to another very easily. Wrapping though, confounds anyone who would aspire to document it, requiring instead a hands-on approach and plenty of use of the skills acquired in order to keep them working and current.

The era when materials unsuited to such technical specialisation were forced into the purpose are behind us and now material solutions exist that embody the needed characteristics by design. This does not negate the need for training though.

According to Metamark’s Max Somper, if anything, the need is now more evident: “We recently introduced to the market a technical film expressly designed for wrapping.

“Despite MetaWrap MD-X being very compliant with the needs of the people who have to apply it, there’s a skills-based element to really extracting its full potential. You can’t just hand someone the instruction manual and tell them to get on with it.”

He continues: “We sponsor a wrapping course at Walsall College that teaches these skills the only way they can be taught, and that’s with material in hand and a practical exercise to complete. Everyone who attends reports substantially the same experience—plenty of Eureka moments as new wrappers are born.”



The Roland Way

The Roland Academy was established eight years ago and was the industry’s first UK-based accredited training programme. It runs out of the company’s Clevedon headquarters and also Walsall College, where it is linked to the college’s Advanced Apprenticeship Diploma in sign-making. Both locations have developed over the years and now each has a suite of rooms comprising of a practical training room for creative hands on applications and demonstrations, as well as a theory room. Walsall College also has a dedicated signage prep room.



Joe Wigzell, Academy and Creative Centre manager at Roland DG (UK), comments: “The Roland DG Academy was formed to provide training in order to help develop the skills of UK professionals across the sign-making and display graphics industries. It offers a dedicated learning environment for course delegates, be they customers, students or Roland dealer employees learning about Roland solutions from scratch, broadening their knowledge or brushing up on what they already know. All the tutors are experts in their fields and the courses are designed by them to deliver measurable benefits and practical experience for all levels of delegates.”



He continues: “The Roland Academy is the only wide-format print training establishment in the UK that is run directly by the manufacturer. As hands-on training that is not linked to the sales channel and with dedicated trainers, it is able to focus completely on educating delegates about Roland machine capabilities and how to get the best results.

“Delegates gain a competitive advantage in the market from attending a Roland Academy training course because they not only learn about the aspects of their machine they know they need to improve on, but they also learn about the much wider capability of their Roland device. The versatility of Roland machines means that very often delegates discover their wide-format printer, print and cut device, or engraver is able to produce a much wider range of materials than they realised. A visit to the Roland Academy can literally open delegates’ eyes to the possibilities of additional new revenue streams from the Roland.”

A recent delegate, Nick Rowntree from Printelle Limited, says of his recent Roland Academy training: “The training was invaluable in terms of improving my efficiency when using our VersaCAMM VS-300i, which we use for custom stickers and short run labels. The trainer showed me how to get the best results from the print, laminate and cut process.”

Rowntree adds: “It was actually quite a simple workflow and I could see where I had been going wrong. The day was full of things like that— simple tricks and tips—and I can already see a difference in the business in terms of less wastage and time saved. I also found out how to add new media profiles to the existing generic ones. We use a variety of media and now that I know how to set up and modify the profiles, I can ensure we get the best results every time.”

Chris Kingston of FP Digital knows how to get everything he can possibly get out of his VersaCAMM VS-540i. However, although able to print high quality vehicle graphics, he needed to know how to apply them so he attended the vehicle wrapping course at the Roland Academy, explaining: “It was a fantastic course and very well run. We covered a lot but in a manageable fashion and at a good pace.”

Feeling flexible

The exclusive distributor for Mimaki in the UK and Ireland is Hybrid Services, and with its complete product range available through a network of added value resellers—all of whom deliver extensive training opportunities for their customers—training from Hybrid is often a very bespoke offering.



“Every customer is different,” says John de la Roche; national sales manager, sign and graphics at Hybrid.

He continues: “We’re geared around offering very specific training and education for Mimaki customers that’s dependent upon their precise needs. Often this can be workflow related—adding wide-format capabilities into an existing operation, for example, or it can be focused around a particular project or skill that the company needs to add. Mimaki’s broad product range dictates the requirement to be flexible in our training offering as the needs of our customers are, unsurprisingly, very diverse.”

As each printer in Mimaki’s range is supplied with a Postscript Level 3 RIP package and Mimaki’s cutters all include plugin software for either Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator; software training is an important aspect of Hybrid’s training too.



“Mimaki customers know they’re investing in a joined-up system,” highlights de la Roche, adding: “Our training not only covers how to get the most out of the hardware, but how it’s driven by the software and how to maximise the benefits of the two working in tandem.”


So, whether through a dedicated training academy with specific courses or via a more flexible, ad hoc approach, training is clearly very highly regarded within the industry. There is of course a cost associated, but if this results in being better able to win new business and deliver more applications, the cost of training will be recouped very swiftly. Standing still is rarely an option in business. Similarly, making investment after investment in equipment may also result in expensive, hard to manage systems. Cost-effective training of key personnel and operators could be just what is needed to stay on track.

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