People & processes
Print staffing shortages: freeing capacity where it matters
A vacancy is visible. What is less visible is how your skilled people spend their day: producing, advising, looking for information or explaining the same order again. Examining this friction alongside recruitment gives you a better basis for hiring, training and targeted support.
The essentials
- Distinguish missing expertise, insufficient capacity and avoidable coordination.
- Preserve practical knowledge through hands-on handovers, not documents alone.
- Assess automation including checking, exceptions and ongoing maintenance.
The industry does not face one uniform situation
The public summary of BVDM’s 2025 workforce survey describes continuing shortages alongside positive developments in apprentice recruitment. It also highlights retirement and moves into other industries. The survey includes 320 participating businesses; it does not establish that every printer faces the same staffing problem.Evidence: [1]
Your specific situation matters more to a hiring decision than a dramatic industry statistic. Are you missing a qualified machine operator? Are quotations waiting to be prepared? Or does every difficult question reach the owner? These issues can occur together, but they need different responses.
Identify the bottleneck before defining the vacancy
Start with an order that recently waited unnecessarily. Trace its stages with the people involved. Ask not just who was busy, but what information or decision was missing before the next step could begin. This gives you a more precise picture of the work that needs covering.
| Observation | Check first | Possible response |
|---|---|---|
| A process requires expertise that nobody else can cover. | Qualifications, training and cover arrangements. | Targeted recruitment or professional development. |
| A qualified team cannot handle the measured volume of work. | Workload, shift planning and priorities. | Additional capacity or revised scheduling. |
| Orders wait for data, approvals or answers. | Ownership and the quality of handovers. | Simpler processes and appropriate automation. |
Do not treat these options as mutually exclusive. A new colleague still needs a clear handover. A better form does not fill an unstaffed shift. What matters is whether the action addresses your actual bottleneck.
Observe a working week without turning it into surveillance
Germany’s Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, BAuA, addresses interruptions and multitasking as challenges in information-intensive work. Interruptions divert attention from the task in hand. This publication is not a print-specific time study, so it cannot provide a fixed number of minutes lost to your queries.Evidence: [3]
Our suggestion is to review a typical week together. Record the activity, its trigger, approximate time required and missing prerequisites. Separate active work from waiting. An order awaiting approval for two days does not necessarily consume two days of labour. Use a few meaningful categories rather than recording every mouse movement.
- Which details are copied from emails into other systems?
- Which questions recur for the same products?
- Which decisions can only one person make, and why?
- Which unplanned changes interrupt work that has already been prepared?
Practical knowledge needs a practical handover
INQA distinguishes knowledge that can be documented from experience-based knowledge passed on through direct exchange. Its examples include paired working, mentoring and shared handovers. A knowledge repository is therefore only part of the task.Evidence: [2]
Select three situations that currently require a particular person. Examples might include an unusual substrate, conflicting customer instructions or a decision about a non-standard print file. Ask them to explain not just the successful procedure, but warning signs, checking criteria and the limits of their authority.
We recommend a short, verifiable learning cycle: carry out the task together, explain the decision, record the instructions and then ask a second person to apply them to a suitable practice case. Use their questions to improve the instructions. Assign an owner and a review date so outdated guidance does not remain in use unnoticed.
Allocate real working time for this. A handover that can only happen when there happens to be nothing else to do has no dependable place in the operation. Start with the knowledge whose absence would cause the most disruption, not the easiest document to produce.
Automate preparation, not decisions you have not defined
A suitable first trial could be structured intake for recurring enquiries: product, quantity, format, stock and delivery date are collected and checked for completeness. For AI-assisted interpretation of free text, we recommend a controlled handover: make suggestions visible, flag uncertainty and confirm technically important details before processing them further.
Before the pilot, define what must not happen automatically. Price commitments, production approvals and material changes need assigned decision-makers. Also review data access, suitable test data and requirements for any providers involved. A failed transfer must become visible and have a documented manual fallback.
Then measure more than fast, straightforward cases. Monitor queries, incorrect transfers and the work required to maintain the new process. If exceptions outweigh the benefit, improve the input or the rule first rather than extending the automation.
Worked example: available time is not automatically a payroll saving
| Activity | Calculation | Weekly time |
|---|---|---|
| Complete processing before the change | 120 × an average of 5 minutes | 600 minutes |
| Checking the prepared information | 120 × 2 minutes | 240 minutes |
| Additional exception handling | 15 × 8 minutes | 120 minutes |
| Process maintenance and monitoring | Fixed assumption for this example | 60 minutes |
| Total processing after the change | 240 + 120 + 60 minutes | 420 minutes |
| Calculated capacity released | 600 − 420 minutes | 180 minutes, or 3 hours |
This example releases three hours for other work. The employee remains employed and paid. It does not automatically reduce payroll or generate additional revenue. Implementation, training and ongoing tool costs have not yet been assessed either. Use your own measurements to establish whether the project makes economic sense.
Decide in advance what the available time is for: quotation follow-up, a planned knowledge handover or customer requests that have been repeatedly postponed. Without this decision, practical relief is difficult to pin down.
What needs in-house expertise, and where external support may fit
BIBB’s occupational profile for print media technologists includes setting up and operating production equipment, as well as monitoring and optimising print quality. This production expertise is different from managing digital sales and administrative tasks.Evidence: [4]
We therefore recommend grouping tasks explicitly: machine operation and specialist production decisions on one side; shop maintenance, marketing, data preparation and agreed digital improvements on the other. For the second group, KT-Digital offers a Managed Growth Officer: a named expert with team backup, working five days and a total of 35 hours per week.
A Managed Growth Officer is not a machine operator and does not replace qualified staffing in your production department. Whether external support, recruitment or a single project fits depends on the task, its duration, the need for an on-site presence and your capacity to manage the work.
A manageable starting point for the next four weeks
Week 1: Select one bottleneck
Observe a recurring process with your team. Record processing time, waiting and queries separately.
Week 2: Clarify the handovers
Agree required information, ownership and a simple exception route. Preserve the practical knowledge needed for the task.
Week 3: Trial one change
Test on a limited scale. This might be a checklist, a better form or a small, checked integration.
Week 4: Decide together
Compare effort and quality, including rework. Decide whether to adjust, continue or stop, and plan a specific use for any available capacity.
The aim is not to explain a staffing shortage away with arithmetic. It is to understand more clearly which skills you genuinely need and which work you can sensibly take off your existing team’s hands.
Sources & further reading
Sources checked: . Some original sources are in German.
- dmpi: Results of the BVDM 2025 skilled workforce survey, published 3 December 2025 dmpi-bw.de
- INQA: Knowledge transfer between generations in small and medium-sized businesses inqa.de
- BAuA: Managing work interruptions and multitasking on a day-to-day basis baua.de
- BIBB: Occupational profile for print media technologists bibb.de
We link factual statements to original sources. Checklists and recommendations are our editorial interpretation; model calculations are explicitly labelled. We do not present examples as customer results.
KT-Digital
Which process consumes unnecessary time in your business?
We can review a specific process with you and assess whether clearer handovers, an interface or AI-assisted preparation would be useful.
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