A Career in Publishing – Role of Vocational Studies in Developing a Good Career

Reading on the website is quite different from reading a magazine. Just as we search a website that looks clean and is cool for the eyes, the magazine too should have cool colors, good quality pages, and a good layout that does not spoil the overall look of the magazine. There are many things involved in publishing a newspaper or magazine, novel or a book, and flyers or a brochure. The aim of the publishing is that these should reach the desk of the person who took it rather that reaching the dustbin. This needs some training, which you can get by joining some institution that offers good vocational education.

The Concept of Vocational Education and its Relation with Unemployment

There is much hue and cry over the unemployment all over the world: from the upper world to the third world. The concept of unemployment is a fake one. There are several tasks that one can do to remove his unemployment as well as the offering jobs. The root cause of unemployment is that people want to work in the companies or firms started by others instead of starting their own. The main reason is the risk involved in self employment.

But then, risk is everywhere. People pay thousands of dollars to the agents who promise that they will get them an overseas job only to abscond with the money. Should the person had invested the same money in starting his own small endeavor; he would have come under the employed category. You may say that we need skills to start any kind of self-employment. This is where the Vocational Education comes in. These are small courses ranging from 3 months to one year wherein you learn some skills required for both jobs as well as self-employment.

Counseling and Vocational Education in Publishing

After doing your graduation, and applying for a year or so without any positive results, you may feel like graduation alone is not a good deal for an ideal job. Yes, it is not. You need some extra skills to get a job. With the kind of the market, companies look for multitalented people who can handle two or more positions at the salary of one.

Then there are other kind of people who cannot afford that much time and money to start earning. They need a quick job. For both cases, you need career counseling, which will recommend you to go for a small vocational course. For example, in the first case, the person will be asked to go and learn some accounting and publishing packages. As every company needs letter pads, receipts, and other stationary, they will hire you if they see that you have publishing skills too.

There are many choices provided by the vocational education, based on the requirements of the market. The only thing is that you should not consider any job as being inferior. Always remember that once you begin, you can always modify your skills to as to get better in life. If you have slight inclination towards art, and you can see errors in the paper ads, you can go for a career in publishing.

Publishing – Job Profile

As mentioned earlier, almost every firm uses some official stationary i.e. receipts, forms, invoices, checklists and much more. These need to be designed somewhere. A simple designer can create the design. But the main part lies in preparing the design for printing. A design can be single colored, two colored, three colored or full colored (four colored). For each color, they take out that portion of the design that employs the color onto a special paper called “plate”. This has to be done carefully so that in the end when all the plates are combined, they give out the actual design as it is.

Multi colored or full colored printing employs four plates of four different colors namely cyan, magenta, yellow, and blue. These four colors can create a million combinations of the color. But to achieve this, high experience is required. You will waste hundreds of plates before you can create the perfect multi colored plates.

Scope in Publications Career

The first choice would be the newspaper other press where magazines and books are published. Advertising agencies have the most number of jobs for publishers. The firms involved in printing and designing also have opening for publishers. Of course they will prefer people with good knowledge of DTP (desk top publishing) applications for designing.

These include Corel Draw, Corel Photo Paint, Adobe PageMaker, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and QuarkXpress. QuarkXpress is the most widely used software in the newspaper industry. This is why when you select publishing as your career choice while counseling for education purpose; they teach you all or some of these packages. But as all are related to designs, the ones that are not taught in the course can be learnt easily on your own computer.

Governments' Help for Vocational Education

As the government knows that vocational education is for good health of the nation, the taxes are low on these types of institutions if they are approved/registered by the government. This also makes sure that the certificates the centers offer after training are accepted by every companies.

Many governments also offer long term unsecured loans for a person in case he or she is interested in starting a publishing firm. The primary aim of the government behind this is that since the scope of publishing is wide, they will not fail. In addition, they will also have to hire additional people thereby providing employment for few more people.