However, jobs are concentrated in large printing centers such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Dallas. Training, Other Qualifications, and Advancement Operators need mechanical aptitude to make press adjustments and repairs and an ability to visualize color to work on color presses. Oral and writing skills also are required. Operators should be able to compute percentages, weights, and measures, and should possess adequate mathematical skills to calculate the amount of ink and paper needed to do a job. Technological changes have had a tremendous effect on the skills needed by press operators.
New presses require basic computer skills.
Web-offset presses, with their faster operating speeds, require faster decisions, monitoring of more variables, and greater physical effort. Apprenticeship, once the dominant method of preparing for this occupation, is becoming less prevalent with the growing importance of formal programs of retraining and skill updating for experienced operators. In the future, workers are expected to need to retrain several times during their career. Apprenticeships for press operators in commercial shops take 4 years. Postsecondary courses in printing are increasingly important because of the theoretical knowledge needed to operate advanced equipment.