Training, Other Qualifications, and Advancement For bindery jobs, employers prefer high school graduates with basic mathematics and language skills. Accuracy, patience, neatness, and good eyesight are also important. Bindery work requires careful attention to detail. Mistakes at this stage in the printing process may require redoing work from the previous printing stages, and so can be quite costly. Manual dexterity is essential in order to count, insert, paste, and fold.
Mechanical aptitude is needed to operate the newer, more automated equipment.
Artistic ability and imagination are necessary for hand bookbinding. Inexperienced workers are usually assigned simple tasks such as moving paper from cutting machines to folding machines. They learn basic binding skills, including the characteristics of paper and how to cut large sheets of paper into different sizes with the least amount of waste. As workers gain experience, they advance to more difficult tasks and learn to operate one or more pieces of equipment. Generally, it takes 1 to 3 months to learn to operate the simpler machines but it can take up to 1 year to become completely familiar with more complex equipment, such as computerized binding machines.