FESPA Denmark: How to attract new talent

We speak to the National Secretary of FESPA Denmark, Anders Mosumgaard, about the Danish print sector’s impressive attempts to bring new blood into the industry.

“It is an ongoing challenge for the sector to have sufficient qualified labour in the technical side of graphical production,” FESPA Denmark’s Secretary and Head of Education at Danish communication industry trade organisation Grakom, Anders Mosumgaard, says.

“The labour force is ageing, and not enough new apprentices are entering the system. That is a challenge we’ve had for some years, especially in areas such as labels, packaging and signage. We have educational initiatives, we have vocational programmes, but we are missing the labour.”

To counter this, the FESPA Denmark board and Grakom came together to host a conference dedicated to the ‘The workforce of the future’, which was held on Thursday 29 January.

“The focus of the conference was to invite employers and ask them to think about what companies can do to make themselves attractive to young people. And not only young people; we’d also like to see older people reskilling towards this sector,” Anders says.

“One example of the kind of initiatives we talked about was a programme delivered by the Danish Employers’ Association, which involves close contact with schools where teachers and students – whole classes – can go and visit businesses. We suggested print shops should think about arranging visits like that.”

Another aspect the conference covered was vocational training. Denmark has only one college that delivers a course for graphic technicians, such as printers, screen printers and book binders. That means potential students face relocation issues when they want to find work afterwards.

“Our suggestion was that companies should recruit locally, because there’s a significant difference between moving for half a year to go to college, or moving your whole life away from your hometown to find work. We have another course called signage technician, and that’s also only delivered by one college in another town, so that faces the same challenge,” Anders says.

Guest speakers at the conference included Frank Sørensen, production director at Stibo Complete, a company that has worked most effectively to attract more apprentices. In 2021, Stibo Complete only had one apprentice in place.

“That was the starting point for us to launch a student programme and run a campaign from January to March 2022. During that period, we got five training agreements…