Five Keys School launches print education at Los Angeles Sheriff's Department

Five Keys School has partnered with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department to invest in individuals living on the margins so they can change their lives.

Offenders often exit criminal justice without a clear path or purpose to pursue a sustainable career. The Sheriff’s Department partnering with Five Keys Schools to provide at-risk youth with sustainable job skills for an opportunity with a great future.

Since the Sheriff’s Department had a large implant printing operation, they looked for a workforce development program that was industry-aligned and leveraged current digital imaging software technology. Five Keys turned to Xerox for its Xerox® Digital Career Pathway Program. The curriculum and instructor resources were developed by print education leader Intellective Solutions. Now Five Keys and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is training students in the industry-required skills to work with digital production printing, and helping them find jobs with local businesses.

 Tom Hood, Five Keys principal instructor of the Xerox Pathways course is passionate about providing students with the opportunity to succeed. A fifth-generation printer, Tom knows the satisfaction and career possibilities that employment within the graphic communications industry can give his students.

“Using the Xerox® Digital Career Pathways Program and working with their partner, Intellective Solutions, I paint a canvas of what the industry is about. At first, it’s difficult to convince a student of how high-tech the industry is. Once we take them through examples of how projects are created and produced, it becomes clear to them that they can have a long-term, sustainable career that pays well. Working with the curriculum and resources has been a tremendous help in building our outstanding program.”

Leading Printers Praise GAERF Skill Competencies and Assessments

Printing company owners Tim Boucher and Todd Ventura discussed the value of skill competencies and assessments for employees of printing companies provided by Graphic Arts Education and Research Foundation (GAERF).

GAERF provides Graphic Communications Skills Competencies (GCSC) and Skill Assessments  for the graphic communications industry. The competencies and assessments were written by industry professionals and graphic communications educators to provide measurable or observable knowledge, skills, abilities, and behaviors critical to successful job performance in six key content areas

“The ability to evaluate and benchmark high level skills for prepress and print production professionals is essential” says Tim Boucher owner of BSquared Design & Printing. BSquared is a state-of-the-art digital printer that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Boucher feels to compete in his very competitive market he insists that his employees maintain the highest level of technical and professional skills. Supporting high expectations of his time-starved customers is an important ingredient to his company’s success. BSquared is one of the fastest growing printers in the Northeast.

Discussing SkillsUSA assessments, Megan Valdez, Managing Director of BSquared said, “Many pre-press professionals are self-taught or learn through on the job training”. The use of these assessments is a way to identify areas where further training or mentoring is required”.

Recently, one of BSquared customer service account representatives reviewed the results of the Digital File Preparation and Output Assessments and found a potential gap in their knowledge of color management. This allowed the employee to take steps to deeper their skill level in this area by working with more experienced employees and reviewing available training materials.

PRP Companies is a full service commercial printer located in San Luis Obispo, California. The President, Todd Ventura, is a firm believer in the value of putting in place a continuing education program for both sales and production staff.

According to Ventura, “because of the changes in the graphic communications industry, we must provide a systematic educational approach to stay abreast of not only technological changes, but also in what types of products and services our customers are requesting”.

Ventura’s staff has been involved with the review of the updated PrintED GCSC skill competencies and assessments. “As the person responsible for ensuring that PRP companies maintains its competitive edge by hiring and maintaining a skilled workforce, the PrintED skill competencies are exactly what we need”

When asked about the value of the assessments for his company, Ventura answered “We were not aware of the PrintED program prior to agreeing to review the materials. However, we absolutely will use the GCSC skill assessments in two different ways; number one is to give preferential treatment to prospective candidates that possess a PrintED certification and number two, to use the assessments to benchmark current employees to help develop a training continuum based on their needs.”