Closing Print's Knowledge Gap Starts in the Classroom

Across the industry, workforce development and labor shortages continue to pose a challenge to print service providers (PSPs). PRINTING United Alliance has actively been involved in stepping up to this challenge. Its “Color Consistency in Print: A G7+ Foundations Curriculum” program is the latest tool designed to help educate students and create a foundation for students who are ready to explore a future in print.

The 14-week instructor-led program is designed for secondary and post-secondary students studying print, graphic communications, or packaging. It requires about 20-30 minutes per week, and is completely free — the curriculum, the CMP Fundamentals course, all of it — for PRINTING United Alliance Educator members.

“The goal here isn't to teach students how to implement G7+,” explains Joe Marin, SVP, Member Services, PRINTING United Alliance. “It's to give them the conceptual foundation they need to understand why color consistency matters and why the industry relies on structured systems to manage it.”

He adds that context is something a lot of professionals don’t develop until much later in their careers. “We wanted students to have this education before they even start,” Marin says.

Traditionally, new employees simply follow around an experienced printer, learning what they do, and it pretty much stops there. While learning from a print veteran certainly has its benefits, Marin believes that learning shouldn’t just be limited to that model.

“That works until those experienced people retire, and right now they're retiring faster than we're replacing them,” Marin says. “Many new hires leave within three months, and a big part of that is because they don't have industry context.”

That’s why the “Color Consistency in Print: A G7+ Foundations Curriculum” is so crucial. “What this curriculum does is give students a reason to see print as something worth understanding,” Marin explains. “They see that it connects to a global methodology, to industry-recognized certifications, and to a real career path. At that point, print stops feeling like ‘just a job’ and starts looking like a profession.

But the industry also needs this for other reasons. “Color gets touched in a lot of programs, but usually in isolation — a lesson here, a lab exercise there,” Marin says of traditional print-related education. “Students learn how to run equipment without understanding why color disagreements happen, why they're hard to resolve, and why the industry built structured frameworks to address them in the first place. That gap shows up the moment someone walks into a real production environment. This curriculum was designed to close it.”

Color Consistency Curriculum Details

To fully understand the impact this curriculum can have, Marin points to its intentional design. For starters, instructors don’t need to be color management experts to teach it.

“One of the biggest barriers to getting this kind of content into schools is that educators feel like they have to be technical specialists to deliver it,” Marin states. “This curriculum doesn't require that. It's discussion-driven and conceptual — the materials are designed to support the instructor, not demand expertise they may not have.”

And while the goal isn’t to teach students how to implement G7+, students will walk away with a “genuine understanding of how the printing industry thinks about color.”

It ultimately connects to the G7+ certification. “[Students] earn the Color Management Professional: Fundamentals certification, which is an industry-recognized credential,” Marin says as part of this curriculum. “CMP Fundamentals is actually a strongly recommended prerequisite for G7+ Expert training, and G7+ Expert Certification is where professionals learn to actually implement and apply the methodology in a production environment.”

Marin points out that this gives students a leg up — they aren’t just prepared for entry-level work coming off this program, but will already be on the path toward the industry's most-recognized color management credential.

While the “Color Consistency in Print: A G7+ Foundations Curriculum” is purposely designed only for educators and students in the classroom, Marin notes that the entire iLEARNING+ program serves the entire printing industry.

“This curriculum was built for a classroom — it's structured around a 14-week term with an instructor facilitating the learning,” Marin says. “But the broader iLEARNING+ platform absolutely serves working professionals. We have over 9,000 learners across 60+ countries and a 176-product catalog built for the industry.”

It’s a platform that’s built to address some of the biggest challenges printers face every day.