When Graphic Information Technology Professor Penny Ann Dolin began teaching graphics on a college level, she realized students in her courses didn't have a grasp of the business side of the industry. "They had skills in their own specialties," says Dolin, "but they didn't see the bigger picture. They didn't know how to charge for a graphics project. They couldn't cost out an entire job."
Dolin says completing a major graphics project takes all of the components into account. No one element exists without the others — and, of course, no job is successful if the original estimate was wrong. Basically, she surmised, her students didn't know how to make a profit.
Fortunately, Dolin saw an opportunity to correct the situation. She created a course at Arizona State University Polytechnic Campus called Graphics Industry Practices. It was designed to teach her students how to operate a graphics business — every ingredient from soup to nuts.
Dolin's choice was to institute the Job Manager solution from MetaCommunications into the classroom curriculum.
Job Manager is a production management system that allows Dolin's students to create estimates, determine and calculate costs, and understand the true costs of doing business.
Job Manager is a great tool to help my students learn how to actually make money is a graphic arts business.
Penny Ann Dolin, Graphic Information Technology Professor
Dolin says she achieves her objective by breaking students up into groups of six or seven. Each group forms a mock company and is charged with developing the departments and cost centers associated with the main products of the company — whether web or print.
Says Dolin: "The students have to determine cost centers and departments, and associate them correctly. They have to decide how they're going to gauge costs, what the minimum increments of billable time will be. They receive RFQ requests for quotes from me, and they have to come up with an estimate based on the data they have entered into Job Manager. At that point, they know whether their project will be profitable."
Dolin says the skills the students learn using Job Manager are fully applicable in the real world beyond the university. "It helps them determine," she adds, "how to figure out all of their different measurements of cost, time, labor and consumables. They have to calculate their profit. It's a great tool to help them learn about how to actually make money in a business. It's especially helpful because it's geared specifically towards the graphics industry."
Dolin says the process her classroom teams typically go through includes:
According to Dolin, "One of the very nice features of Job Manager is its web interface. That means that my students access the system from anywhere with an Internet connection, making it easy for them to accomplish their work whether inside or outside of the classroom."
How successful is the course? Dolin says it empowers students when they realize they can take a proactive approach to running a graphics business. In fact, former students are already putting that power to use.
Dolin reports, "I had an email from a student last year saying, 'I can't believe how valuable this knowledge is where I work now.' A lot of companies are using Job Manager. This course makes my students job ready — and it's a big differentiator when companies realize how much more these students are trained than average graphics graduates. They arrive at the workplace with real management skills."
