Why Manufacturing Deserves a Place in Every Careers Conversation

As thousands of young people recently received their exam results across the UK, most attention turned to university admissions. Yet a parallel conversation deserves equal weight: the career pathways available in modern manufacturing, specifically within the printing and packaging sector.

The Skills Gap in Print Manufacturing

The printing industry has transformed into a technology-driven sector requiring expertise in color science, material engineering, digital workflow automation, and data integration. Press operators manage multi-million-dollar equipment with digital interfaces and automated color control. A prepress technician needs to understand PDF standards, color management profiles, and variable data scripting. These are technical careers with competitive salaries.

2026 Pinnacle Products Preview: What the Printing United Exp

2026 Pinnacle Products Preview: What the Printing United Expo Will Showcase

The PRINTING United Expo, September 23-25 in Las Vegas, will feature technologies spanning apparel decoration, label and package printing, wide-format, commercial printing, and promotional products. The 2026 Pinnacle Award winners will be among the main attractions.

Durst P5 350 HS - Hybrid UV-LED at Scale

Durst's P5 350 HS won the UV/Latex Hybrid category. It runs at speeds up to 7,620 sqft/hr and accepts media up to 138 inches wide, handling both roll-fed and rigid board materials with up to six independent queues. Durst collected five Pinnacle awards this year.

Flexo vs Gravure: The $358.5bn Packaging Print Market in Numbers

Flexography and gravure together account for a packaging print market worth $358.5bn, according to a Smithers market study that maps both processes over the next five years. The number matters because the two technologies sit at opposite ends of the run-length spectrum, and the split between them keeps moving.

How the two processes differ

Flexo prints from a flexible relief plate: the image sits on raised surfaces that pick up ink and transfer it to the substrate. The plate is photopolymer, exposed and washed out like a printing plate for letterpress, then mounted on a cylinder. An anilox roll meters the ink, a hard ceramic cylinder engraved with millions of tiny cells that deliver a controlled film thickness to the plate. Flexo runs on almost any substrate, from film and foil to paper and corrugated board, which makes it the default for labels, flexible packaging and folding cartons.

Corrugated's Next Five Years: What the $265bn Forecast Says About Packaging

The global corrugated packaging market is worth $240bn in 2026 and is forecast to reach $265bn by 2031, according to a new study from Smithers. The Future of Corrugated Packaging to 2031 breaks the market down by grade, end use and geography, with five-year forecasts. The headline number is steady growth, but the study describes a market that is resetting, not simply returning.

Six forces are driving the reset

Smithers names six converging forces: automation economics, sustainability regulation, demand-side change, e-commerce growth, consolidation and geopolitics. Automation is the most measurable. Top-quartile operators run with 20-40% lower costs than bottom-quartile peers, and that gap compounds as energy and labor costs move.

Cybersecurity Enters the Print Room: What Connected Digital Presses Mean for Packaging

Digital printing has moved packaging production onto the network. Files travel from management information systems to presses, artwork updates arrive over the cloud, and variable data flows into every job. With that connectivity comes a risk profile the industry did not face twenty years ago: unauthorized access to press systems, exposure of customer data, and production disruption.

Why connected presses changed the risk picture

Digital printing transfers digital files directly onto materials without physical plates. Every stage of that workflow, from MIS to RIP to press, is a digital handoff. Packaging Insights spoke with Bobst, Mondi, Flint Group Digital Xeikon and Xaar about how suppliers handle the exposure. The shared answer is layered: controlled workflows, restricted access, and encryption.

Canon Brings B2+ Sheetfed Inkjet to the U.S.: The varioPRESS iV7 in Context

Canon U.S.A. used its thINK Ahead 2026 conference in Boca Raton to show the varioPRESS iV7 for the first time in North America. The B2+ sheetfed inkjet press was announced in 2024, demonstrated in Europe in June at the Power to Move event in Venlo, and is now set for U.S. availability in the first quarter of 2027.

The headline number is 8,700 sheets per hour on 19.7 x 27.5 inch B2 sheets, a speed class that puts it next to half-size offset. The larger 23 x 29 inch B2+ sheet matters for imposition: six letter-size pages fit on one side, and the company says that can lift productivity by up to 100% over a standard B2 sheet at the same speed. Sheet sizes run from 13 x 19 inches up to a custom 24.5 x 29.5 inch option.

India's Print Industry: 2,700 Digital Presses and the Offset Question

India's print industry counts roughly 250,000 companies, and a figure aired during a PrintWeek-HP knowledge session this week puts its scale in perspective: total print demand of USD 3.7bn, with business-to-business spending accounting for 96.3% of it. Digital press installations alone reached 2,700 in the year to 2026.

The session's central question was not whether digital will replace offset, but what new business digital can create. The distinction matters. Offset presses running months at unchanging Pantone shades remain unbeatable at volume. What has changed is the volume itself. Brands want shorter runs, faster turnarounds, versioning and late-stage personalisation, and that demand makes offset's plates, make-ready time and waste look like an expensive habit rather than an efficient one.