Packaging is an exciting, dynamic profession that uniquely involves business, engineering, design, and environment. Packaging professionals bring to market innovative, cost-effective packaging that allows their companies to attract new customers and increase their business. They are developing revolutionary new food and drug packages that extend the life of perishable products so they can safely be shipped all over the world. Our society is realizing the importance of packaging, and more persons are needed to enter the packaging profession to help protect consumers, our natural resources and the environment through packages that are environmentally sound.
Packaging has various functions in today's society.
It provides protection for the product it contains, for example in absorbing impacts and vibrations in distribution, and protection to humans, through features that indicate if products have been tampered with. It provides communication through symbols that are only read by machines, such as the bar codes, and intensive communication in the human environment through colors, and many printed messages that help sell the product and inform users and consumers of product attributes. The demand for packaging professionals is very high, mainly because there are only a few schools that offer packaging as a discipline. San Jose State University is located in the heart of Silicon Valley and is the only university that offers a packaging major west of the Mississippi River. Packaging is the nation's third largest industry, and it is growing.