Business Skills

80- How to Write a Winning Job Description

Learn how to craft the perfect job description based on informational building blocks that highlight the job role and your company. We also explore how to use generative AI (GPT) engines to help create and improve job descriptions.


  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode here at The Print University. Pat, today we are talking about how to write a winning job description. Now I've got a kind of a leading question here. Why in the world is that an important topic for our industry today? And quite frankly, it's been for several years from what we've been hearing, right?
    • [00:00:20] Pat McGrew: And I think that the challenge in a lot of shops is that there's just not experience in writing job descriptions. Whether you're a large shop or a small shop, there aren't a lot of HR people around in the print industry. There are a lot of times the hiring is being done by the departmental managers and sometimes, the press room manager. Sometimes it's the business office manager, but not people who actually are used to two things that are absolutely essential with job descriptions. One, really understanding what the job is that you're trying to fill and writing that job description in such a way that you're selling your company as a place that someone would even want to work.
    • We know what bad job descriptions look like. They write, they're the ones that tell you like 4 million things and the 800 degrees you have to have that make no sense whatsoever for the job that they're hiring for. A master's degree in business management or business administration for somebody who is a press operator does not make a lot of sense to me. But I've seen that on job descriptions.
    • [00:01:22] Ryan McAbee: You just hit the, my pet peeve in terms of reading job descriptions. It's like you really have to match the requirements that you're putting in there to actually the skillset and what you need of that job role and not overshoot just because you need to check a box for whatever reason you think you need to check the box.
    • And that happens a lot of times with educational requirements in general, that, "hey, we have to have a master's degree or we have to have a some sort of higher education degree." And that's not really true for a lot of the roles that we normally have in our industry. 
    • [00:01:51] Pat McGrew: HR managers, professional HR managers will use that as a way to reduce the number of applicants. And even if they don't actually care whether you have that degree or not they're trying to reduce the number of people, the number of resumes they have to sift through. The thing also is understanding what your legal responsibilities are as an employer. That varies state to state. 
    • You have to be concerned about three things. Describing the job you're actually looking to hire for. You have to be concerned about selling your company as a place to work and corporate culture, and you have to be worried about what your state legally requires. And in some states you have to include the salary in the job description.
    • That's true. If you're in Colorado, that's the law. 
    • [00:02:35] Ryan McAbee: So let's get into the little bit more of the specifics. What is a job description? And what kind of role or how do we go about constructing or thinking about it? 
    • [00:02:45] Pat McGrew: I think the most important thing is to really know what that role is that you're trying to hire for.
    •  It's going to start with that detail of what the role is, where it sits in the organization, how empowered that role is. That takes some careful wordsmithing and crafting. You don't want to undersell the role and you don't want to oversell the role. If you're looking for a specific kind of person.
    • Now, if you're looking for a much more generalized person. Then you want certainly a broader description, but if you've got a very specific niche person that you need to put into your shop, you want to be specific. You want to be as specific as you can. You want to write at a level that is easy for people to understand. That means you shouldn't be writing it to show off the fact that you've got an upper level degree in English literature. You should be writing it to be accessible to the people that you're trying to hire, remembering that in today's job market, English may not be the first language of your best possible candidate.
    •  The more we can make it easy to understand, two things result from that. One, people who are still mastering English have a, an understanding of what you're trying to do. But the other thing is that it allows translation engines to do a better job. And that is an essential part of job hunting today. 
    • [00:04:10] Ryan McAbee: And another pet peeve of mine is using acronyms either internally about your organization or industry jargon acronyms that no one else outside of the industry, because let's face it we're often hiring outside of our industry these days and bringing people in and having to do training for them, but don't use those. Nobody else understands your organizational structure and that Department adr is that Department XYZ is this department, and I see that quite often in job descriptions that are written.
    • The other thing that is important to call out here is, usually the person who's writing the job description has no feet on the street or practical knowledge of that role that they're hiring for. You really have to go talk to other people in that department or people who are in that same role today or people who have done it in the past, some way to get that extra knowledge and expertise of what really is required in that role.
    • What traits, what skill sets do they think is going to allow someone to excel in that role? Who is being hired, right? 
    • [00:05:07] Pat McGrew: Let me talk about your acronym thing for a second. Departmental acronyms are terrible. And we see it all the time in job descriptions. We'd like you to come into the CCD department.
    • Okay. What's that? What is your CCD mean? Like, how would I know? And that happens, that's a hangover from when we used to do ads in newspapers and we got charged by the letter. Everything got, pulled down as tightly as possible, we're on the web now and your job descriptions are being broadcast. You got room. Use it. Explain what the role is and what the department is and to some extent where it fits in your organization. 
    •  You're exactly right that, a job description in the best of worlds is a collaborative experience. It's being written. Somebody's got to own it. Somebody's got to have accountability for it.
    • But it makes the most sense to sit with the people who are going to be working with this person who's going to be hired. What do they need? What characteristics do they need in that team member? What did they need them to know? What can they teach them? And that should be part of the job description as well, emphasizing not only what specific things you really do need to have as skills, but what skills can be taught as you come into the job, what the career path of the job is.
    • You need to clarify expectations and, oh, Ryan, some of the stories I've been told about adventures in hiring candidates who then don't show up for work. They don't show up for the orientation sometimes, and then they don't show up. No phone call, no email, no text message, nothing.
    • They just don't show up. And, the hiring manager doesn't know whether they, were in a car accident there or something catastrophic has happened, or if they should be waiting on them to show up day two. 
    • [00:06:52] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, some of it's driven by the market itself because things just happen when it's a tight labor market.
    • But honestly, some of that could be attrition because they sit into the orientation or they get through a little bit of the interviewing process and they realize that job description that was written, it is not matching up in any way, shape or form with the expectations of this role, or maybe the compensation package for this role as well.
    • [00:07:15] Pat McGrew: There can be that. Maybe they've met the team members and they've decided, oh, I don't want to work with them. 
    • [00:07:20] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, it could be. 
    • [00:07:20] Pat McGrew: There are a lot of things that go into that job description and one of the advantages of that collaborative approach to writing the job description is that the team members that person will be working with have an opportunity to set their expectations and needs. It also gives them a little bit more ownership of the process, which means maybe that they can embrace the person who comes in the door instead of treating them like, the maid which, sometimes happens. 
    • These core responsibilities you might say, Oh, gee we're going to be asking this person to do a lot of different things. We're going to be asking them to to work in pre press, but we might also ask them to occasionally help out in some other area of the shop because sometimes we have jobs that take all hands approach to getting work. And we've done that. We talked with printers who do certain jobs during the year that everybody in the shop is dedicated to this job in order to get it out the door on time.
    •  Helping a new hire understand that, here's your primary job, here's what we expect you to know coming in, here's what we're going to teach you, and then here are other things that are going to be important to your success in the job. And that's those soft skills that you see highlighted there.
    • It's communication. It's teamwork. It's knowing how to ask a question, knowing when to ask a question, accepting feedback. Knowing when to go to a manager and say that there's a struggle that you're having a struggle with something and helping them understand what the business does. 
    •  Some heartbreaking stories of people who've left jobs in the print industry because they took their first job, they were so excited about it, they got there and they thought they were doing a really great job, but they really weren't because they didn't understand where they fit in the overall end to end, quote to cash part of the workflow environment.
    •  They were making decisions about how to do their job that made them less efficient and less integrable into what everybody around them was doing. You can be the best envelope stuffer in the world if that's not really the thing. That's a mission critical task, and there are these other pieces that should be done and that you should be integrating with. You probably won't have your job very long. That's why helping define those core responsibilities in the job description. And then, vetting with the team that these really are. All these not just some nice words we want to put into convince people were a nice place to work and it's going to be a fun job.
    • [00:09:51] Ryan McAbee: I like to think of it's using the 80 20 rule, which works in so many scenarios. And I think it does here is that whatever the person is going to be spending 80 percent of their time that they need to be really good at and their skill sets need to support. That's what you really need to focus on and be top priority when you do your actual writing of the job description . That leads us to the, skills and qualifications that, that you may need to effectively do the work and make sure that you're going to be a right fit. 
    • Pat, you talked a lot about the soft skills, but at the end of the day, there's some very specific skill sets that this industry needs and you have to make sure that either they have that history and background and knowledge, or you're going to have to be able to train them to acquire it, right?
    • [00:10:30] Pat McGrew: If you have a job opening for a color management specialist. In most cases, you're looking for somebody who has some certifications under their belt. You're looking for somebody who, knows G7. You're looking for somebody who understands the ISO color standard SWAP and FOGRA and actually understands what those acronyms mean.
    • You're looking for somebody who understands what, patch tests are and understands how to do color profiling and linearization and know what those words mean. It's okay for to put those kinds of specific requirements into a job description. You're hiring somebody who is intended to be a professional level person in your organization working in a specific operation. You need to explain what your expectations are. 
    • You're trying to hire a press operator. It's a good idea to say, "hi, we need a press operator who understands these things, right?" These kinds of presses, digital press operations are different than offset press operations. They're different from white format press operations there for each segment that we work in, whether it's textile or apparel, sign and display transaction or direct mail, or you're doing movie posters that there are specific requirements in each of these jobs that you have to be prepared to identify in your job description.
    • You need to decide what level of expertise you're looking for. Are you bringing in a junior person to shadow a senior person? Then make that clear in the job description because you don't want to hire somebody who thinks they're going to be top dog only to discover that they are actually the junior person.
    •  Set those expectations. Again, communicating expectations is the most essential element of job description. And if you're looking for someone, you want to be a leader, then include some of those skills in the job description so that they get touched as well.
    •  
    • [00:12:23] Ryan McAbee: Be comprehensive with that part of crafting a description. And then, I liked what you put in here about how to be a success. What does it look like? You have to be careful with this as you go to craft it though, because we've all seen those kinds of job descriptions where it says, " loves to work in a fast paced environment that where you're, constantly juggling or on your feet or whatever.
    • [00:12:44] Pat McGrew: Don't write that. Just don't write those job descriptions. 
    • [00:12:46] Ryan McAbee: Think about how people on the other side of that are gonna interpret that, right? They're gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna be stressed all the time. They don't have enough staff to do the work and everything else. You have to be careful with how you think someone's gonna be successful and how to translate that into the job description.
    • [00:12:59] Pat McGrew: And you do, but you can also can stage it in terms of expectations, we are a fast paced shop. We do 24 hour turnaround. Our orders come in and go out the same day looking for somebody who can thrive in that kind of environment. Or, we're a fine print shop. Our orders our customers are exceptionally concerned about color quality and print quality and substrate quality. Our jobs are typically brought in on, day one and exit the shop on day 12. Just setting some expectations of what kind of shop it is. Now, of course, some shops do everything right. They have some work that's coming in and turning around real fast and others, other jobs that are longer term. You can find a way to describe it. 
    • One of the best ways is to use that collaborative team that you're using to build your job description to say, what would you tell somebody about your daily life? What does a day look like for you? And then capture that information and use that to inform.
    • This is one of those cute places where a generative pre trained transformer engine, a chatGPT a Gemini, a Copilot, capture that information from the people doing the job and ask them to help you write a job description. Ask one of the tools to help you write a job description. It won't be perfect, but it'll give you a start and that can be really useful. 
    • [00:14:16] Ryan McAbee: One of the last components obviously of interest to anybody that you're going to be hiring is what kind of total compensation are you offering? It goes well beyond the salary that's right. And sometimes prospective employees, they don't realize the burden costs that you have, particularly in the U. S. market because of all the insurance and other things that are typically provided with the role. I've never seen anybody take that tact in a job description, but certainly in an interview, you could stress that as well. But there's intangibles, right? 
    • [00:14:45] Pat McGrew: There are. One thing that, everybody wants to know about what the time off policy. Is their family medical leave? Is there a flexibility in the schedule? That's a really big one. Are you offering a retirement savings program? Are you offering, medical insurance? A new employee, somebody who's maybe first time coming into the job market, where they're coming into their real first professional environment. They might not always know that those things are actually part of their compensation package and that they should be looking at not just the paycheck but also the other benefits that they're getting. That's a learning thing. That's something that very often HR people or company owners spend time really talking about.
    • One of the printing companies I was talking to last year about some of their hiring challenges said that they would bring, they'd have five or six people that they bring in for orientation and they would spend like an hour talking about all the benefits outside of the package. A lot of the people had never even heard of those things. Many of them came from backgrounds where they didn't have any exposure to a job that included insurance or included, retirement savings or included some kind of flexibility in their work hours. Those things are important.
    • Health and safety requirements. Most print shops are they live by OSHA rules, right? It's occupational safety and health and be prepared to be told that you might need to have steel toe shoes to work on the print shop floor. Pair to be told that you need to be wearing safety glasses when you're working, because you're working in an environment where things can fly and people can get hurt if you're being told to wear a certain kind of clothing that's just something that you should preset.
    • That, we do have a work uniform code and maybe just a dress code for working on the shop floor. That includes, steel toed shoes and safety glasses, right? Those kinds of things make a difference. It's also a good idea to alert to include in your job description, as an alert, that this job may include overtime and people want to know that. Some people love it. Because wow, it's more money and they're just thrilled to death to get it. Other people because of their family responsibilities or maybe school responsibilities don't have the option to work overtime. That would be a conversation that both the hiring person and the potential employee should have a conversation about those expectations before anybody signs on the dotted line.
    • [00:17:24] Ryan McAbee: Another that we don't see as often in the printing industry, but it certainly would still apply for like an outside sales position, if that's what you're hiring for is the percentage of travel that may be required. And what is that trouble is local versus what may require an overnight stay and that sort of thing.
    • The key point here is that you have different parts and sections that we've identified here that are needed in a job description, but then to make it even better, and you alluded to this before Pat, you can approach it one of two ways. You can craft your initial attempt at a job description and then put that into a gpt engine and say make this better or make this a cleaner version or make this able to be read at a fourth grade reading level.
    • There's all these different kind of prompts that you can use Give it or you can go the other way, which is as you're working through each one of these sections, you can say, "Hey ChatGPT, the prompt I'm going to give you is basically if these are the requirements of the role and what we're trying to hire for, how would you actually write the description?
    • And then you edit and tweak from that point on, right? 
    • [00:18:21] Pat McGrew: What we've got here is an example of a prompt that could be used with any of the GPT engines. It can, chat, GPT, Gemini, Perplexity, anything that uses variables. This is one of those sneaky tricks that professionals who embrace AI learn pretty quickly. There are a lot of things that you ask that you're curious about on a regular basis, so you learn to build a template for a prompt that includes things that you can vary.
    • In this case, we're asking the GPT engine to take on the role of a human resources professional to write a job description that is going to attract what my company needs. Now you can pre train, you can establish a little bit of information about your company in the first prompt.
    • You could say " tell me everything you know about. printing XYZ my company" and then it will actually go look at your website and look at the internet to try and gather some information. Then you use this prompt as a follow up to ask it to write the job description and it will likely come up with something that's probably 80 percent of what you need. You will want to fix it. The thing that we know about these pre trained transformers is that they tend to write in a flat way and I can recognize generated text pretty quickly because it does tend to be flat. It tends to have a certain cadence to it that, that's very recognizable.
    •  You may still want to make some fine edits afterwards, but these are the places where our new love of AI can really be useful in helping us create the best job description. Again, part of this job description needs to sell my company to the prospective employee. So I need to make sure that I'm couching everything that I'm asking of my prospective new employee in this job description in terms of job description that also tells them why they should even want to respond. 
    • [00:20:25] Ryan McAbee: The other thing that you could also use the GPT engines for is saying I'm going to now take this job description and I'm going to post it on nd. com or LinkedIn or wherever your outlet is going to be and you could say, help me rank higher in the search results. It'll keep refining based on whatever you're asking for. So never think that you're done after one iteration. You can keep refining and editing with the GPT to get it even more polished for however you're going to use it in the end. 
    • [00:20:52] Pat McGrew: Absolutely true. 
    • [00:20:53] Ryan McAbee: We know that we've been in a pretty tight labor market for a while now, and we don't really think that's going to change dynamically for us. For our industry, just based on its own unique aspects. So how, what are some other ways we know you can play around with compensation? And it's not just a salary. It's everything around that, that we've talked about, but what are some other ways that printing companies can get a little advantage. 
    • [00:21:15] Pat McGrew: I know a lot of printing companies that offer tuition reimbursement for additional education, vocational education, or university college, university education. Offering flexible work hours is a big one, right? That is something that I think everybody got used to during the COVID years. The ability to work from home not have to go into an office. Look, you're not going to be running a press from your home. So if you're going to be a press operator, you're going to be in the shop.
    • A lot of the jobs in a print shop require you to be physically present, but there, there may be flexibility in the hours. And especially in large urban areas, I've seen print shops that work odd hours, but they do it so their employees aren't traveling during rush hour. So they're not paying the highest tolls. They're not paying the highest for the train or the bus. There are a lot of things like that you can offer. 
    • There are also, access to different kinds of benefit packages. If you're one of the larger print shops out there, there are all kinds of organizations out there that put together these secondary benefit packages That includes, like discounted tickets to Disney, discounted tickets to Six Flags, discounted tickets to, whatever the local amusement parks are. We do this at the restaurants for our custom, for our employees. We have a deal with the County where we can offer discounted tickets to the Water World. It's not great in the winter, but during the summer, that is a very popular perk and that makes a huge difference to the mothers to the ones who have a lot of kids and the kids are out of school. That water park is their salvation. That makes their life way better. Those are things that you can look for. There are a lot of companies like Beneficent and others like that do that.
    • The other thing that people apparently are really quite interested in and I'm happy to hear this is things like charitable donation matching. And that's again something that organizations like Beneficent can help you set up to to do that kind of, if you're donating to PBS or you're donating even to your kid's school, or you're donating to whatever charity is important to you, that ability to do matching funds, that's a perk that a lot of people like.
    • [00:23:22] Ryan McAbee: Many printers are part of some sort, trade association or organization. So don't overlook what benefits you have as being a member of that organization. There's often a lot and you may not be fully utilizing everything that's available. 
    • [00:23:34] Pat McGrew: They offer education and insurance and some of these benefit packages.
    • [00:23:38] Ryan McAbee: That's right. That's right. Absolutely. 
    • The other thing I would also just encourage everybody take a look around at your physical environment. Does that, does it look like a place to spend time in? And it's amazing to say that because we as printers, probably have a wide format printer. We can probably make wall graphics.
    • We can probably, at least if we can't do it in house, we can, we knew people.
    • [00:23:58] Pat McGrew: Who got a friend who can down the street. 
    • [00:24:01] Ryan McAbee: So just brighten up your space and think about how you can design a space that's more inviting for people to be there for eight to ten to twelve hours a day. 
    • [00:24:08] Pat McGrew: I have seen printers wake up to that idea and start really using their walls to, to represent the business. Also, spotlight some of your customer work, spotlight some of your customers. Keep it visible so that everybody remembers why they're doing the work they're doing. That's a really good idea, too. And by the way you should try to keep your print shop clean. One, it's better for the presses, it's better for the computing equipment, it's better for everybody, but it also presents better.
    • [00:24:37] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. To not only your employees, but also any customers that want to come through and look at your shop. 
    • [00:24:42] Pat McGrew: And vendors. It, basically, you want to leave a good impression with everybody. 
    • [00:24:45] Ryan McAbee: Agreed. There are many different avenues where you can then take this job description and go make it available to the world and hopefully attract that great candidate that you want to hire. There's the online ones that many of us know and love and use today, LinkedIn, Facebook Indy. com all these are job. 
    • [00:25:00] Pat McGrew: Monster is still out there. Yeah, there, there's a lot of them out there. 
    • [00:25:03] Ryan McAbee: A lot, but let's think outside the box a little bit because you might not, find the person that way, right?
    • [00:25:09] Pat McGrew: I've had success hiring people from reintegration agencies from immigrant resettlement agencies and from VoTech school. So let me tell you what reintegration agencies do. They are working with people who've had a hard time. They might have previously been homeless, but they've got some skills that they've just had some bad luck. They're working with an agency to get a job so they can get back into the mainstream of society.
    • Sometimes, they're you're working with agencies that are helping people who've recently been incarcerated. They're looking for a way to get, again, reintegrated, get back with their families and be able to make a living. Our friend Paul Hudson at Hudson Printing does this. He works very closely with the Utah Department of Corrections. That has turned out to be a great place for him. There are a lot of really good people out there and they want to work. They need a job and they're going to take whatever advice you can give them and those are the people these agencies can help you find them very often they have their own job boards And they'll even assign a caseworker to you to help you find the people in their system that might be best for you.
    • And don't forget the vocational and technical schools. We were talking with one of our our clients at one point. He was telling us that They go into the Votech schools and they talk to the machining classes, the electrical engineering classes the mechanical classes. They talk to everybody because if you think about the skills those people are being taught, they are incredibly relevant in our world of print. Those are definitely people to talk to, and they're going to be well trained, and they're going to have a lot of the soft skills because they've come through that training. 
    • [00:26:46] Ryan McAbee: That's a good point. The other one that is not on here, but it's in the school system as well are the higher education, the ones that have degree programs that still following within our industry. Many of those host annual, if not multiple times during the year, job fairs that you can participate in on campus to meet, interns that eventually will turn into employees and so on.
    • So that would be like R. I. T., California Polytechnic, Clemson University. And there's a handful of those still around, right? 
    • [00:27:12] Pat McGrew: There are and Clemson. We know RIT in Rochester, New York. We know Cal Poly produces a huge number of people they've turned towards specializing in packaging, which is a really hot topic and they produce a lot of really good people 
    • Check with your local universities. I was surprised to discover here in Denver, we have a campus that has three universities that are part of it. So it's got University of Colorado, metro State University, and then some other hospitality university that's part of it. They actually have a whole group of people out there just looking for interesting graphic arts work. They're being trained in color management. They're being trained in printing as a traditional print course, but from the standpoint of creating for print. And I was delighted to hear that. 
    • [00:27:59] Ryan McAbee: Yeah, that's exceptional. So we hope this is right. Enough information to where you can craft that perfect job description to land your next employee.
    • And with that, we're going to go ahead and in this episode, and I hope that you will join us here again at the print university.

83- Communicating Across Generations

Let's travel through the decades to understand the milestones that shaped different generations and how that influences workplace communication.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION

    • [00:00:00] Pat McGrew: Hey, it is Pat McGrew with The Print University. And as always, I am with my friend, Ryan McAbee. And we have a really special episode this time. 
    • [00:00:10] Ryan McAbee: This one is going to be fun. 
    • [00:00:12] Pat McGrew: This one is going to be fun because we get asked about this all the time. It's become a really big talk track. A lot of the organizations that we work with are discovering that their members have discovered that communicating across the generations is a little bit more challenging than they thought it might be.
    •  We are going to start, Ryan, with the Boomers because I am a Boomer. 
    • [00:00:33] Ryan McAbee: Okay. 
    • [00:00:34] Pat McGrew: And so, there you go. And, why not start with me? 
    • [00:00:37] Ryan McAbee: We are looking at it as the normally defined generations that have come. We are starting with the baby boomer generation because most of the silent generation was the one that was before this, or the greatest generation. They have different names, but they are mostly out of the workforce at this point in terms of population size. 
    • We will go from the boomers all the way to GenZ. That is four generations in total. The other thing to preface here is that I think it is important - that these are generalities. Obviously, everybody is unique. You have outliers in every population set. We group these date ranges because they have been formed by their thinking, attitudes, perspectives, and by what has happened in technology, by what has happened culturally, in these different periods, as they came into their formative years.
    • The other thing I will point out, too, is that there are shoulder generations. I am one of those. I have heard different names for this. The most harsh name that I have heard for my shoulder generation is geriatric millennials. 
    • [00:01:36] Pat McGrew: Oh dear, I would not have called you that. 
    • [00:01:40] Ryan McAbee: There is a more friendly name for it, too. It's just to say that they are trying to bucket these, but there are these branches and offshoots, depending on timing. 
    • Let’s start Pat, like you said, with the baby boomers, and what happened then?
    • [00:01:55] Pat McGrew: So,  I am right smack in the middle of this one. I am 1957, to give you an idea. The thing about boomers is that we were the post-war generation. And, we were not just post World War II, but also post Korean War. There are a lot of births. A lot of economic prosperity during this time. A lot more emphasis, I think, on education. The government made it possible for GI’s to go to school on the GI bill. Many took advantage of it and launched their careers based on that capability. 
    • We had a new approach to diversity and civil rights. I can remember the hippie movement. I can remember a lot of the early civil rights adventures. I remember Martin Luther King in DC and the I Have a Dream speech. Those are all core parts of my generation, like the Beatles. I can remember being very young and I can remember watching them on The Ed Sullivan Show, their first U S appearance on American television. My father was looking at them, going “What the heck are they?” My brother's reaction to me saying I wanted to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan was, “Where are the beatles? I'll kill them.” Okay. The Beatles were part of the soundtrack, a lot of the soundtrack, of my early years. 
    • That cute Mustang sitting there right there. That one is a 67 Mustang. That is actually in my garage. I have that car. I have it and I love it and I am never giving it up. 
    • [00:03:24] Ryan McAbee: You don't know this, Pat, but some of this information I pulled from Britannica, the encyclopedia outfit. They attribute some of these images as the iconic thing of that era.
    • The Mustang was the iconic car. The Frisbee was the iconic toy. And, the cassette tape was the iconic technology or music technology. 
    • [00:03:43] Pat McGrew: The cassette deck was important and eight-track - it is the eight-track, right? So, you see a vinyl album, an eight-track and a cassette deck. We have in our garage a ‘62 Eldorado and it came with an eight-track deck. God bless the previous owners; they left cassettes in the car and it still works. We pop those in every once in a while. 
    • The thing that's important to know about boomers is that we come in many different flavors. We come from the tech world; there are technoBoomers, and there are technology lovers, and there are technology haters. There are people who have never bought into modern technology. You may have any and all versions of a Boomer working in your print house.
    • [00:04:35] Ryan McAbee: The other thing, just generations that we will talk about, the boomers were actually the second largest population - the number of births that happened during that period. They were just overtaken by Gen Z. It's pretty close. It was like 75.8 compared to 80.
    • [00:04:49] Pat McGrew: We created a big wave. And, the boomer generation is responsible for a lot because they have seen economic prosperity. They are also a consumer generation. Boomers tend to be buyers. 
    • [00:05:04] Ryan McAbee: That is right. What are your best tips to communicate if you are from another generation - to communicate with someone who is from this baby boomer generation?
    • [00:05:13] Pat McGrew: At the baseline, this is a generation that, as a rule, believes they deserve to be respected, not disrespected. They want to be addressed not necessarily formally, but they do want to be addressed. They tend to prefer in-person face-to-face meetings to resolve issues. Many are as comfortable as I am, doing things on Zoom or by text or by email or Whatsapp or whatever. You need to take a sense of the person that you are dealing with. 
    • Many of us are older, right? As I said, I'm 67. My hearing is not what it used to be and we have people in the house my age who are wearing hearing aids, and it is something to be aware of. You do not want to be pointing it out. Oh, you are wearing a hearing aid. I will speak up. But you do want to be respectful of some of the things that some of us are facing now. We might walk slower. We might not be lifting as much as we used to. We might not be speaking as quickly as we used to. We might not be hearing as well as we used to. We might not be seeing as well as we used to, but it does not mean we are not useful. Look for the signals of the person that you are talking to because you might be talking to a 67-year-old who's happy to go surfing. You might be talking to a 67-year-old who is having trouble getting around. And you are going to find every level of boomer in most print organizations. You will find them in prepress, you will find them in color management, you will find them as press operators. In fact, this is one of the reasons we have been doing a lot of “how to write a job description” classes, and we have been discussing replacing some of the workers in the shop because many of us are at retirement age. The funny thing about boomers is that they do not all retire. 
    • [00:07:01] Ryan McAbee: That is the trend, right? That has been happening this generation in particular. You can work longer in the workforce for a couple of reasons. We transitioned from a very labor-intensive job market to where you now have this entire professional skill set that does not require that physical component. So you can stay in the workforce longer. In some regards, financially, they need to stay in the workforce longer. 
    • This goes under the tips section, and what you are talking about is if someone has any difficulty with sight or hearing - they will let you know that. They will give you instructions on how to facilitate that. Someone else I know cannot hear very well at this ear. They will say, “Can you just speak in this ear?” Or they'll turn, depending on what is needed.
    • [00:07:40] Pat McGrew: The thing is, you do not want to make a big deal out of it. You just want to accommodate it. If you are walking as a new employee into a shop, for example, watch how other people treat other people and you will start to get a sense of who might need you to speak to their left ear instead of their right ear. What you're looking at is a requirement to treat everyone respectfully and to be responsive. 
    • [00:08:02] Ryan McAbee: To go to polar opposites here. If you are a Gen Z, your communication method first instinct is not going to be face-to-face conversations, right? It is not going to be the telephone. It is probably not even going to be email. So you are going to have to really think twice about who is on the other side of who I need to communicate with. The fact that I am trying to reach them on Slack is probably not going to be the best method. I might need to actually walk over to their physical office or I may need to pick up the phone. 
    • [00:08:29] Pat McGrew: Again learn from your peers and how they are treating people and watch that. But then also make decisions for yourself about the best way to communicate with the team members you need to communicate with.
    • [00:08:41] Ryan McAbee: We are really trying to bring awareness to everything here because it works in the reverse, right? So, if you are a Baby Boomer and you are trying to communicate with Gen Z and you do not understand why they not answering any email, it is probably because they do not even look at it. 
    • [00:08:52] Pat McGrew: No, it is going to be text. It is going to be Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram. 
    • [00:09:00] Ryan McAbee: Let's move on to the next generation in this cycle. And this would be GenX. This is also referred to sometimes as the sandwich generation because they are sandwiched between baby boomers and millennials. It is sometimes referred to as the MTV generation or latchkey kid generation. I have heard all of those terminologies. I am actually part of this, technically. I am on the very back end of it toward the 1980 side of things, but this was really the generation that is not a big one from the numbers perspective but GenX, right now, is in the prime working years.
    • Technology was just starting. Sometimes this generation is referred to as a bridge generation, as well. I will give you a perfect example. I had no problem following the album to the eight track to the cassette tape. I knew all of those. I have seen all those, have used all those. On the other end of the spectrum, we are just as comfortable, typically, with anything technology-wise that comes out today. Whatever new social media platform flavor is going to happen, we can adapt and adopt that. 
    • The other thing that happened, in the more formative years for a lot of GenX was uncertainty. You had a lot of stability with the Baby Boomers. This generation had a lot of aspect around the Cold War. We had space exploration with the space shuttle. I remember sitting in second grade and watching the Challenger on television and then all the teachers had to figure out how to explain that situation. 
    • What I would say is a hallmark is that we tend to be adaptable to a lot of the generations that are in the workforce now.
    • [00:10:25] Pat McGrew: I think that GenX people come in flavors and some are more technology adaptable and embracing - and others maybe not so much. 
    • I was coming through school in these years and we were definitely impacted by the Vietnam War and the politics around that. The economics were interesting during those times. As a rule, when I think of that generation that you are a part of, it is more embracing of possibilities and more aware of the boundaries on both sides - aware of what the previous Boomer group expects, but also aware that there are new generations after you that are much more inclined towards instant communication than legacy communication channels.
    • [00:11:18] Ryan McAbee: This generation was the first one where the workforce and workplace started to really change, as well. You went from Baby Boomers who may have the opportunity to have worked for one company their entire life to where the marketplace opened up more and you were transitioning between jobs and between roles, which also led to this concept of work-life balance that never had been talked about before. Some of that came into place because technology enabled you to work not from a physical office but from anywhere you were in the world. That is what this is in the infancy, of course, and then it went even more so in the later generations. 
    • [00:11:51] Pat McGrew: A lot of changes were infrastructure changes in the way we live in the U.S. at that same time and the way businesses operated. This is an era when we went from - this is going to sound silly to mention, but there's a reason for it - We went from ships being loaded a box at a time to cargo containers. So these things that we are so used to seeing now, these big cargo containers full of stuff coming from all over the world, that arrives in manufacturing and infrastructure at that time, and changed the way businesses built their products, where they bought components, and how they sourced things, which changed a lot of other things.
    •  It made it easier for us to buy paper from overseas.
    • [00:12:38] Ryan McAbee: Globalization.
    • [00:12:39] Pat McGrew: Because we were able to buy containers of paper that would not be destroyed on the ship on the way over, it made it possible for us to ship printed materials outbound and have them fairly well-protected, as well. These efficiencies we started to see in manufacturing, that grew out of some of the early technologies.
    • IBM was a big name during this era because IBM was seen as the technology giant. They were the computer people, and they were the people who understood data. They were behind a lot of the the development of things that ultimately led to Apple as a computing company and Xerox as a printing company and all the other technologies that we embrace as printers.
    • [00:13:25] Ryan McAbee: From a communication method perspective, I do feel like GenX defaults to email as the first point of attack. Then we will go through the litany of other things that need to be done if that is not appropriate or it is not getting the response that we expect. 
    • The other thing that is interesting timing-wise today is that this generationmay be taking care of a Boomer in some way and perhaps in multi-generational living. They may also have the opposite end of the spectrum if they have children where they are caretakers. Their time is precious, is how they view it. And, that is why they prefer very concise, direct communication and often through email, which is not taking up time on a phone. They can respond when and if they need to, when they have the time to do it.
    • [00:14:09] Pat McGrew: This is also a very entrepreneurial generation. In a way that boomers really were not - they were looking for that lifetime job. 
    • [00:14:17] Ryan McAbee: Yeah. 
    • [00:14:18] Pat McGrew: Once you get into GenX,  there is this real rise of an entrepreneurial class. I have talked to many printing companies that have been around for a hundred years, but a lot of them came out of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Now, they are looking to pass to their next generations. 
    • [00:14:35] Ryan McAbee: Every subsequent generation has had a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit because of the dynamics in the workplace and workforce and how business has evolved. You are right. It probably did start in full swing with Gen X here, and it has been interesting to see how all this kind of plays out and melds together. 
    • The millennials were up next from 1981 to 1996. The hallmark is they were practically the first all-digital generation from the beginning. Not necessarily connected generation. That is going to be the next one, when the internet really was ubiquitous. They can understand technology very well, but there are also defining events that took place around this time - you had Y2K that came about toward the end.
    • They have had more economic challenges, I believe, as they got started into the workforce. 
    • [00:15:22] Pat McGrew: Yeah, we went through a recession. We went through a lot of interesting times in that early nineties time frame that from both a business and a home life perspective were challenging to a lot of people.
    • It is an interesting group because there are more millennials than there are GenX. We saw birth rates go up. We saw America really spreading out and the suburbs and exurbs, just started growing like crazy. 
    • The needs of the generation are different. The needs of the parents raising kids in this time and the way the kids are being raised is different. PC Junior was a thing. We had one in our house and a PC Junior was literally marketed as a PC for kids. The company I was working for at the time gave me one for my child because IBM gave it to us. It had cartridges for Sesame Street learning games and Big Bird learning games and all sorts of stuff.
    • It was a generation that had access to technology from a very early time, but that does not mean everyone had it. It depended on where you lived, and what your economic status was. There is a whole group of people who came up through this time, went through their primary and secondary education, always aware of digital capabilities.
    • [00:16:50] Ryan McAbee: This was the era, particularly in the beginning, in the 80s time frame, where the Apple and Apple IIe and all the other Apple equivalent models were in the public education systems heavily. It was really the first point where educators were using that as an educational tool, as well.
    • [00:17:08] Pat McGrew: It wasn't thought of as a tool. It was looked at as an educational resource. When my son was in junior high school, one of the requirements was that he have access to one of the Apple computers. Either he had to go to the library to use it or had to have one at home because that is how assignments were being issued. A lot of the assignments were done on the computer and then fed to the teacher. 
    • [00:17:33] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of education, this generation was really the start of the expectation that you had to get a four-year degree, more so than the previous generation. 
    • [00:17:41] Pat McGrew: Almost a requirement in many ways. You wind up with different kinds of job descriptions - they looked a lot different during this era if you were out in the marketplace then.  But if you were growing up, most schools had two tracks, right? They had the “you are going to college track” and the “you are going to a vo-tech” track. And that is a different approach. 
    • I think that one of the things we all need to remember about both the GenX and Millennial folks, if we're not part of that generation, is that they profile in a lot of the same ways. They have a lot of commonalities, but their actual experience is different.
    • [00:18:24] Ryan McAbee: What happened in the world that formed opinions? And, the culture was quite different between the two generations. 
    • [00:18:30] Pat McGrew: If you were in high school in the nineties, I can remember talking to a friend whose son was in school at that time, and he said the Y2K thing really had everybody freaked out, and it was four years away.
    • What was the problem?
    • [00:18:41] Ryan McAbee: The first technology bubble happened around that time frame, too. 
    • [00:18:46] Pat McGrew: This is the beginning of dot-coms, and the internet is past the glimmer stage. There is actually an internet. There is a worldwide web. That is out there and we now have email, right? 
    • [00:19:00] Ryan McAbee: You've got mail era! 
    • [00:19:01] Pat McGrew: It is the AOL. I remember a number of the people that worked at the company I was working at the time who left our company, which was a technology company, to go to work for AOL as a startup. It is one of those things where we were all excited at this idea that you would be able to talk to people and email with people and get access to information and search for information. It was all still early days and that shaped the character of the generation in a lot of ways. The expectations for instant communication are higher with millennials today.
    • They do not want to get an email that tells them that they are going to get information about their inquiry in three weeks. 
    • [00:19:44] Ryan McAbee: This definitely follows through with GenZ, as well. The timing - this expectational timing - is much faster because they have been in that kind of world and lived in that kind of world.
    • I do feel that millennials are much like GenX. They are very adaptable in their communication methods. They do not really have a default. They can work within any and get the conversation started. I do think they have less tolerance for using the right tool, though. What I mean by that is that if you are writing four paragraphs in a text message, they are probably not going to resonate with that. 
    • [00:20:12] Pat McGrew: They are not. The other thing that is important to remember is that we used to disparage millennials in the print industry. We used to worry that millennials hated paper and did not want to get anything on paper, or they wanted everything to be delivered electronically. The data does not actually bear that out.
    • What the data bears out is that as millennials matured, they recognized the value of multi-channel communication and embrace all channels. So, if you want to email them,  they are happy. If you want to text message them, they are happy. If you want to send a letter or a direct mail piece,  they are happy with that, too. That is something we often forget because there is still this lingering talk track that hangs in the print industry - that millennials hate paper and hate written communication. 
    • [00:21:02] Ryan McAbee: That is a good point because data does bear that out. In practice, it goes back to the driving aspect of this generation. They will use any and all channels to get the information they want, in the best format, and the most efficient instantaneous reach of that information.
    • In a book format, if you will. If I am at my home, I might go pick up the physical book because it is there and it is easy. But if I am on an airplane and I am packing a suitcase, I will leave that book at home and use my Kindle on the plane. So, it is that aspect that is very much omni channel.
    • Let's move on to GenZ. That is the most recent now entering the workforce. They actually are larger by birth than the Baby Boomer generation, which is lost in the conversation. To be perfectly honest with you, I didn't know that until about a year ago. I just always assumed baby boomers were a larger population set, but no, GenZ actually overtook it. 
    • The hallmarks of this generation are a couple of things from my perspective. One is that they are the first connected-generation, fully from the time they were born. The internet existed along with everything that brought about. There is a heightened awareness with this generation to everything. 
    • The other thing is that, culturally, there are some juggernauts that have happened - that this generation has propelled. We see Harry Potter and it is a phenomenon that definitely happened during this cycle. The whole Taylor Swift has also blown up. They have cultural icons that have scaled unlike any other previous generation. So that must mean that they, collectively, are a little bit more homogenous about what they value and what they think and what they like, right?
    • [00:22:35] Pat McGrew: I do not know if that is true. I am not seeing evidence of it. So remember that you are talking about 12-to-27 year olds. 
    • [00:22:42] Ryan McAbee: That is true. 
    • [00:22:43] Pat McGrew: Just think about where you were between 12 and 27. A lot of changes happen in your life in that time, right? You are going into and then finishing secondary school, maybe college, and then maybe looking for your first job. We have all seen the viral videos of Gen Z's going in for a job interview and looking at their phone the whole time. When the job responsibilities are identified to them, they go, “No, I don't do that. Thank you.” And, they leave. And I do not think that is a fair appraisal of GenZ. I think that what you have to realize is that because they have grown up 100% digital they have had all the screen time.
    • They know how to manipulate and use technology quite effectively because they have done it all their lives. They all have had cell phones in their hands from day one. Even if it is not their phone, they are used to handling them because some caregiver gave them a phone to play with for a while and watch Sesame Street on PBS Kids.
    • They have also grown up with some technologies that have been growing up with them.  They have grown up with YouTube and with Instagram and with TikTok and Snapchat. And, while the Millennials might remember some of the other platforms, these are their platforms, right?
    • They embrace TikTok. Some news that I read the other day indicates that the heaviest consumption of news by GenZ comes from TikTok and YouTube. They are the two and YouTube still ranks as one of the most prevalent search engines. It is the most widely used search engine.
    • And,  that is because the people who are searching are looking for video content to learn from or to entertain them. They are not looking for text to read. It changes the nature of how you want to communicate with these folks. 
    • We have lived through now Covid. But we are a more globalized generation. GenZ - the more globalized generation. They are just as comfortable talking to somebody from outside the U.S. as from inside. 
    • [00:24:43] Ryan McAbee: That is a good point. The name that this generation sometimes gets is the delayed generation. They were just entering the workforce and they had things that happened that were outside of their control.
    • You had the financial disaster that happened in 2008 timeframe that blocked a lot of them while in school, but that still impacted their view of the world. It was also when a fair amount of them were going into the workforce. You had the Covid situation, which caused all kinds of disruption in terms of the labor markets.
    • [00:25:10] Pat McGrew: It does. And it colors expectations. You are talking about a generation where work-life balance is way important to them. It is actually that life is important to them and work is the thing you do so that you can live your life the way you want to do it. We see it in the restaurants with the people who work for us. They work this job as a bartender or waitress or cook because it is not their advocation. It is that they have this other thing they want to do and they need to fund it. This is a job that lets them do that. They make enough to be able to do what they want to do. 
    • We did not put it on a slide, but there is a sense that they do not trust easily. They are looking for authenticity because they want to know that the people they are dealing with, and businesses that they are dealing with, and employers that they are dealing with are being honest with them  -because if they are not, they are going to exit. They do not want to be lied to. They do not want to be glad-handed. They do not want to be pushed along. They want to know that there is value to what they are doing. That they are contributing. And they want to grow into empowerment. They want to be empowered to do the job that we are paying them to do. That means we have to be careful. The burden does fall on the employer to figure out how to communicate with these people. 
    • The difference is, when I was coming up in business, I had to meld myself to what the business wanted. That was the expectation. When I was working on material requirements planning and shop floor control and high tech software, I was expected to come to work looking a certain way, wearing a certain outfit. It was not t-shirts and jeans. It was a suit. And I was expected to interact in a certain way. As we have come through the generations, through GenX and Millennials, a lot of that has been relaxed.
    • [00:27:04] Ryan McAbee: Yes. 
    • [00:27:04] Pat McGrew: It makes workplaces a little bit more convivial and typically better places to work. But it means that we have to learn how to communicate with this generation. And the burden is on the employer to do it. If you are going to expect the Gen Z employee to meld to you, they are going to leave.
    • [00:27:21] Ryan McAbee: Good point. 
    • [00:27:22] Pat McGrew: They get blamed for not having a work ethic. And I do not know if that is true. I think the people who believe Gen Z doesn't have a work ethic are the people who do not know how to communicate with them, to identify to them what the expectations are of the jobs they are being hired for. And, we see it everywhere. 
    • [00:27:39] Ryan McAbee: Or, do not understand their motivating factors. I think toward the end of the millennium and definitely in the GenZ generation, all the survey information I have seen is that, unlike previous ones, they really want to understand the why behind what you are asking them to do - something like - how does it fit into the bigger picture?
    • It goes to that distrust thing that spun out from the fact that they were the first connected, completely connected, generation that had to figure out what information was valid and trustful and what information was not right?
    • [00:28:08] Pat McGrew: I am not sure we did a good job as educators helping them understand how to make that distinction.
    • [00:28:14] Ryan McAbee: Exactly. This segment was that they also value a purpose. They have to know the cause, like what is your fundamental thing that  you are providing as a benefit to the world. That is what I can get behind other than I am making a widget. 
    • [00:28:28] Pat McGrew: Explaining the why - that is really important. If you can do that, and if you can find a pathway in your organization to communicate on the platforms that they are comfortable communicating on. 
    • [00:28:39] Ryan McAbee: You had a funny story for me the other day that someone you had spoken with  -m there was a GenZ on one end, and I think it was a boomer on the other end? 
    • [00:28:47] Pat McGrew:  The story was that he was sending email to him over and over. And he was about ready to fire him. And, then he fired off a text message, and the GenZ person said, "Oh, I never read my email." With the text, they turned the request around almost immediately.
    • We hear that over and over again - that sending emails to GenZ people, even if you have put them through the company orientation, you have explained the company email address - very often their approach to the company email address, if they are not in customer service, if they are a pressman, if they are in pre-press, if they are in the back office doing accounting - is that it is not really important to them, right?
    • If you really want them, you are going to send them a text. That is why a lot of organizations started looking at things like Slack and the communication elements within Teams or using even the corporate version of WhatsApp or the corporate versions of Skype, because that is instant communication that is expected in this generation because they had it all of the way through school.
    • Very often, that is how they communicated with their teachers, right? And certainly in college. That is the case. The business methodologies have been turned on their head. The business expectations have been turned on their head by GenZ, because they expect you to be proactive with them, not for them to have to chase you to figure out what you want from them.
    • [00:30:17] Ryan McAbee: To sum it up, here, across the generations it is really figuring out what method and what accommodations you need to make when you are speaking with the other side. To some extent, that means that you, as a company, have to figure out a toolset that can provide for all those different ways.
    • And that is what you were just pointing out- maybe you adopt Slack, maybe use more functionalities with Teams, whatever the case may be. But that is going to accommodate all these different generations and their preferences to make sure that everybody is on the same page  - because that is ultimately what you are trying to accomplish, right?
    • Everybody is going down the same lane. 
    • [00:30:47] Pat McGrew: When you are onboarding any new employee,  whatever age they are, it is worth having the conversation with them about how they need to be communicated with and how you typically communicate with your employees so that everybody has the right set of expectations going in. And, we do not have the mismatch like we had with somebody sending emails for two weeks and not getting a response and being annoyed. 
    • [00:31:12] Ryan McAbee: Honestly, most companies do some sort of personality profiling, right? I think that is a great addition that you brought up to say let's figure out their communication style, as well.
    • And, that way everybody knows how to.
    • [00:31:25] Pat McGrew: I am not sure that is part of standard onboarding anymore at this point, because I think it is still everybody trying to get their arms around how to deal with this generation. 
    • [00:31:34] Ryan McAbee: Exactly. That is our little step through the generations and the best tips and methods to communicate with each other.
    • And, thank you for joining us for this episode. And, we hope to see you here next time.

84- Thriving in Your First Job

How can you thrive in your first job? We discuss the soft skills and tactics to hit the ground running in your first job.

  • VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION


    • [00:00:00] Ryan McAbee: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Print University. We are starting a newer series called Business Skills, Pat. 
    • [00:00:09] Pat McGrew: Every time we talk to one of the associations we work with or a vendor or even a printing organization we work with, the thing that they always tell us is, "Gee, we are hiring people who don't actually know how to be employees."
    • [00:00:23] Ryan McAbee: This is the second episode in this series: Thriving in Your First Job. It strikes me as an interesting topic. The workplace has changed a lot in the past years. I think there was a dividing line at COVID and pre-COVID; would you agree?
    • [00:00:40] Pat McGrew: I think that was a big line. I started to see a shift as we were coming through the early 2000s. You started to see a shift in the nature of people coming out of even universities. I heard different organizations complain about things like, "Gee, every time we hire a designer, all they know is how to design web pages." We heard a lot of that. 
    • The other thing we heard a fair amount of was that the people coming in did not always have the infrastructure skills to be good employees. COVID was crossing the chasm because suddenly you might have had a new employee who might have only been in the office for six months or eight months, and you are asking them to work from home. Or you are asking them to work in interesting in-plant experiences where you are trying to stay six feet from anybody. How do you learn from a mentor when you are six feet away from them and have a mask? It is a hard thing to do.
    • [00:01:48] Ryan McAbee: That is the purpose of this episode! To talk about tips, reminders of communication styles, and awareness of the diversity in the workplace. That is every type of diversity that you can think of, whether it is age, gender, et cetera. Let's get right into it. As you are starting out in your first job, what do you think are the critical things to be prepared for? 
    • [00:02:09] Pat McGrew: Certainly, you want to understand how you look to your employer.
    • I think everybody has seen the TikTok videos and the Instagram posts about Gen Z employees coming in, never looking up from their phones, and not engaging with anyone around them. I do not know how true that is. I think it is a nice meme. It is important to think about how you present yourself when you show up for the interview, even if it is a Zoom interview. Then, how engaged you appear when you show up for the first day of work. 
    • I think it is important to think about how you look and how you dress. It is not a fashion contest. But, come in prepared to work, prepared wearing clothes to make it easier for you to do your job, whether you are in the office setting or you are on the shop floor. Come in looking like you are enthusiastic and happy to be there because that will allow people to engage with you in a different way. They will be interested in having a conversation with you and helping you succeed.
    • Every employee has a job to do. When you show up, they want to know that you want to be part of the team. They do not want to have to work hard to make you part of the team, right? 
    • You want to think about the prep work that goes into showing up for work and not just the first day on the job, but every day on the job. Understand when you are expected to be there and how you will get there - and have backup plans. If you think about a schedule, a print shop runs on its requirement to get work out the door. If you are 20 minutes late for work, habitually, you are not helping get that work out the door. If you are the kind of person who needs to get that cup of coffee in before you really start work, get in a little bit early, get the coffee, have a couple of conversations, and then be ready to start work when your shift starts.
    • If you are taking public transportation, make sure you know the schedules. If you are driving, think about how reliable your car is and what your backup is if your car wants to fail on a regular basis. Think about all of those things and make sure you know who to call if something's going to go wrong. Everyone has emergencies - they happen to everybody. 
    • Then, make sure you understand the job that you are being expected to do when you show up, right? A lot of things might look interesting, but you have been hired to do a thing. Make sure you understand what that thing is. Seek to get as good at it as you can so that you have a career path - so that they will offer you more opportunities. And as I said, think about your attitude, how you present yourself.
    • I promise you, whether it is your first day on the job, 52nd day on the job, whether it is your first job, second job, or third job, there are always things you do not know. There are things that you will need to learn. Come in with open ears, open eyes, and an open mind that there are things that you can learn. Now, if you are in your second or third job, and you have learned something somewhere else, and you think there is a process change that might benefit the operation, do not be afraid to offer that.
    • Do it in a respectful way. "Hey, I used to work over here. We did this way." Do not be pushy about it. Do not be a bully about it or negative, right? There are always things people can learn. You just have a light bulb idea. 
    • I've worked in shops where that light bulb idea comes out of the blue because someone had it, and it is game-changing to a process or procedure being done. The biggest takeaway - come in with an open mind and a willingness to learn, and you will succeed. 
    • [00:06:02] Ryan McAbee: I completely agree. When you are first starting out in any role, whether it is your first job or your 30th, the key thing is that there is a settling-in period. During that settling in period, you're getting to learn the lay of the land. You are part of a team, granted. There are other people that are in your department, maybe doing a similar role on a different shift, whatever the case may be, and you have to figure out how you fit into that puzzle before you can start exerting more of your influence across that group. You need to understand the personalities involved. You need to understand the job function and role and how that operates in this particular company because the same task at a different company could be done completely differently. 
    • [00:06:45] Pat McGrew: And some of that will depend on the tools they are using, right?
    • Printers are interesting people. Some of them buy end-to-end workflow suites that guide all the work from order entry through to delivery. Others have the do-it-yourself approach where they have modules that they have acquired and written - and no two print shops I have ever been in are exactly alike.
    • [00:07:08] Ryan McAbee: That leads us to the expectation of the employer and the skills you bring to the table. Now, I think I bucket this into two different kinds of skill sets. There is one that is general business skills, which is what we are pretty much laying out here.
    • The other bucket is that you were hired because you are going to learn a role and job-specific skillset that nobody else, or very few people, inside of the print shop are doing. One is more of an expertise that you will develop or already have to some extent, and the other one is just general business acumen, so to speak.
    • [00:07:42] Pat McGrew: While all of these skills, clear communication, collaboration and teamwork, willingness to learn and adapt, openness to feedback, time management, and attention to detail - they are all important. But I want to focus for a moment on time management. It is one place where we see a lot of printing production managers complain about employees who just do not seem to understand that certain things are supposed to take a certain amount of time. 
    • The whole profit margin of the company is built on the idea that each task will take a certain amount of time. There are time and labor rates - the Budgeted Hourly Rate - associated with each one of those tasks that are rolled into the estimates and the quotes that go out to a customer that caused them to buy the job. While you might not think it makes a big difference if you take an extra few minutes on a break or you stop for a cup of coffee, those things do make a huge difference because, in many shops, it is budgeted down to the minute for a task. Every minute that you are away from that task has monetary ramifications in terms of the profitability of the business. 
    • [00:08:57] Ryan McAbee: It is probably just as common from a timing perspective that it is not an employee-driven decision necessarily as that timing issue. You will undoubtedly run into production issues and challenges, right?
    • The stock is not behaving because it was not acclimatized to the environment properly or whatever the case may be. That is when you need to raise your hand and let the production supervisor or whoever else needs to be in the loop know, "Hey, this is taking longer than what we estimated.” Then someone will have to figure out how to reflow all of that work that is now stacking behind what's taking more time. 
    • [00:09:33] Pat McGrew: It is a critical skill to learn - not just managing your time, but also being able to communicate how your time is being used and where those gotchas are. Attention to detail is another one I would call out because everyone in the plant is responsible for quality. Everyone. And even if you have been there, whether you have been there one day or you have been there 10 years, your eye is as important as everyone else's. See something, say something. 
    • [00:10:03] Ryan McAbee: The company has a role in this, too, right? The company has a role to ensure that there are systems in place and procedures established to account for these things. Whether it is the delay in production or something that needs to be tracked or flagged from a quality perspective.
    • Ensure that your team members and the management have shared with you what those are.
    • [00:10:23] Pat McGrew: And how to communicate. I think, on day one in any new environment, whether it is your first job or your 30th job, you should be asking what the communication protocols are.
    • How do people here want to communicate? Do they use Slack? Do they text message each other? Are they using Microsoft Teams? Are they just walking up and saying hi? Are they creating email chains? Every organization has its own way that it wants to communicate and you are responsible for finding out how you fit into that mix.
    • [00:10:57] Ryan McAbee: Speaking of communicating in an effective and efficient manner; everything is a time challenge inside of a printing environment, like you said, because there are due dates that are associated with everything that comes through. You do not want to belabor communication. We see this a lot in production meetings  - the daily kind of meetings that many print shops have to start off the morning - that they will get into tangents and lose valuable production time that could be spent doing the actual work. Be mindful of that sort of thing; be concise. Know that you are one part of a bigger cog in a wheel that is moving toward the same goal, ideally.
    • [00:11:34] Pat McGrew: You may have noticed that we are repeating a lot of these concepts over and over again. There is a reason for that. When you are trying to develop a good set of business skills, repetition counts. It helps you get it into your DNA. You should not be offended by people telling you the same thing over and over again.
    • You might say - you already told me that yesterday. You don't need to keep saying it to me. Honestly, they do. They need to repeat every one of these things we are discussing - the communication effectiveness, the ability to spot problems, the ability to have a good, solid, productive conversation with your peers and your management. You need that to become muscle memory so that people do not have to keep repeating things, and they will know when to stop. 
    • Everybody juggles a lot of irons, and things can slip, so repetition becomes your friend. 
    • [00:12:34] Ryan McAbee: Not only repetition but when things do happen that are not planned, it is how you react mentally and physically with everybody else involved in the team that will make the difference.
    • Whether you are going to be successful in solving that problem or it is going to be a barrier that keeps lingering. So look for new ways, as you are practicing this repetition, to benefit the organization. 
    • [00:12:59] Pat McGrew: Yeah, absolutely. The next thing we have, as again we are being a little bit repetitive, but again, there is a reason for it.
    • Let's look for the last time at managing your time. Learn your start and end times. This is critical. Do not forget that sometimes your shifts might change. Over your time working with an organization, they may need to shift schedules for different reasons. They may have end-of-week, end-of-month, end-of-year, and end-of-quarter work that becomes critical, and it is an all-hands-on-deck thing. 
    • Be prepared to have a little bit of flexibility in your schedule. The more flexible you are, the larger role you can acquire in the organization and I think the more opportunities you will see. Make sure you understand things like breaks being scheduled. Some organizations have a really lovely break room. They might even have a lunchroom. In other organizations, you might need to run to the corner 7-11 for coffee or a sandwich. Make sure you understand what that is. Do not forget to ask, right?
    • There is no harm in asking and asking them to repeat to you how long tasks should take, how to do them most efficiently, and asking somebody to keep an eye on you to let you know if you are making a mistake. It is great to develop a mentor/mentee relationship with a variety of people in your organization so that they can help guide you to be the best you can be.
    • At one point, everybody you work with was on their first day in the job, on their first job. Everybody knows how it feels. And I am positive that you will find they will want to help you. 
    • Also, this last one, do not forget to ask about personal device policies. They are all over the map. In some organizations, they do not care if you have your phone out, but they may also want you to be watching an app that is in production from your personal phone. That happens. On the other hand, they may have a personal device policy that says your phone gets locked in a locker outside of the production shop room, and you can do it. You can see it on your breaks. You can see it before and after work. There is good reason for that. In a lot of print organizations, there is security work being done. So that is a reason that there is a personal device policy. 
    • On the other hand, they may also give you a device in some organizations. They provide a company-owned phone or tablet you may or may not be able to take home. Just make sure that you are following whatever the rules and policies are. There is a good reason for all of them. A lot of it has to do with how your privacy is being protected as well as the privacy of the data the company is managing is being detected. 
    • Be aware that if you are in the state of Illinois, there are some really interesting policies - legal policies - around what kind of data can be captured about you when you are at work. Some other states are working on similar policies. It is another reason you might not want your personal device on the shop floor in a shop you are working in. 
    • [00:16:10] Ryan McAbee: Knowing your local regulations and rules and environment and policies, even within the company, is a good reminder there.
    • A lot of these issues, if you come at it from a curious mindset and you ask questions, you will get the answers that you need to be successful in your role. Ask about any kind of ongoing educational opportunities that they have. That might be as simple as shadowing someone who is senior, who has been in the role longer. 
    • [00:16:43] Pat McGrew: We have also seen very successful programs, particularly for newer hires that would go in a shadow different departments so that they understand. They do the department-a-day or department-a-week approach to get you oriented to the entire shop. 
    • [00:16:48] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. And that way it gives you a good perspective on how the role you have been hired for fits into the rest of the larger operation, which is very helpful.
    • [00:16:57] Pat McGrew: And if you are watching this, it is probably being made available as part of one of those learning opportunities. 
    • [00:17:04] Ryan McAbee: Absolutely. Then different organizations might also have more formal career paths that they will discuss and set up because there are different succession levels. As an example, you might start as a shop floor employee working a piece of equipment, but then if you have really good organizational skills, time management skills, and skills that would fit nicely in a supervisory role, that is the next logical step that you would have. Then you could go up from there.
    • [00:17:31] Pat McGrew: If you think logically, you might be put into the problem resolution area. You might be the perfect customer service person. Also, ask about external education opportunities because many printing companies, especially larger ones, offer opportunities to pay for classes at local colleges and even might help towards degrees. 
    • [00:17:53] Ryan McAbee: The last things to ask about here relates to your working hours, how you are compensated for that, and what is the availability of time off. Like you mentioned, Pat, there are peak production times for most shops. It is highly unlikely that you are going to be able to take a very extended vacation during one of those times, unless it is planned for way in advance and the company has a way to navigate that.
    • [00:18:16] Pat McGrew: Federal government, state government, sometimes even local taxes apply to your paycheck. Very often, you are accruing vacation time. You are accruing sick days. 
    • You do not just show up on Monday morning and say, “Hey, I'm going to take Friday off.” In most shops, production shops, that is just not going to fly. You are going to need to do some planning. Certainly, emergencies happen, but you want to make sure you understand who you notify. Do you have to go to your HR team member? Do you go to your direct manager? Who do you talk to? 
    • You may be offered overtime. If you are offered overtime, make sure you understand what the box that is being drawn around that is and how much you are going to be paid for it. In some cases, you are going to be paid more during overtime because it runs over a 40-hour work week. 
    • Also, understand the context of your complete package. In the US we do not always think of it that way. Europeans are used to it because there is always a contract for the job. But here, think about not only how much your take home pay is, but all the other benefits you are getting. You may be getting health benefits or insurance benefits. You may be able to opt into a retirement account. Where I am in Colorado, it is the law that every employer has to make it possible for people to save for their retirement, and the state makes it very easy to do that. It is always worth understanding, even if it is your first job. Planning for retirement - it is not a bad idea.
    • Make sure you ask all the questions of the people who are onboarding you into the job, and do not be afraid to go back and clarify things as you look at your first paycheck or as you are offered new roles in the company, as you're given a raise, as you are offered over time. Do not forget to ask questions.
    • [00:20:01] Ryan McAbee: That is a very good point to end this episode, and we hope that you are extremely successful in and thriving in your first job because we need to have a growing base in the printing industry going forward, and we are glad you're here.

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