What does a publishing apprentice look like?

Your first thought might be the image of a stereotypical school-leaving-age apprentice. Given that mandated education in the UK occurs between the ages of between five and 16, this is not an unreasonable first guess.

However, it’s valuable to recognise the discrepancy between our assumptions and the reality of what apprentices and apprenticeships look like, and how these unconscious and prejudicial biases around education can be, in my opinion, profoundly limiting to our professional development. Learning is not something we should relegate to early career or younger professionals, or any age – it should be lifelong.

Discussing the history of apprenticeships in the book trade, Dr Maria Vassilopoulos, who has a PhD in book trade history from UCL and is global sales manager at University of Wales Press, tells me that apprenticeships were in place broadly for centuries in printing and book production. “As books came to be sold more commercially, it was common in the 19th century for people to serve a bookselling apprenticeship for up to seven years before working in publishing. This was the route taken by some of the founders of today’s publishers, including Daniel MacMillan. The most common route to gaining experience in 20th-century publishing was unpaid work.”

While the Society of Young Publishers was instrumental throughout the 1990s for facilitating conferences and training and advertising new publishing MAs, unpaid work placements were standard until the arrival of paid internship schemes, something that Maria remembers advising jobseekers on during her time at Jobs in Books at The Bookseller (2013-16).

The publishing apprenticeship pathway is a relatively new creation. The level 3 and level 4 qualifications were launched by LDN back in 2019, and since then publishers including Taylor and Francis (2019), Pan Macmillan (2024) and others have launched their own programmes in a bid to drive representation from under-represented groups within the industry.

Publishing has many imbalances – a dominance of people from privately educated backgrounds, a saturation of university graduates and a culture of paying early-career workers less than they deserve (often not in keeping with the rate of inflation) because it is, purportedly, how it’s always been.

For many businesses, budgets for training increasingly being slashed and there is a lack of awareness around the existence of apprenticeships as development pathways later in life. Training and development should not have to be something that workers should have to fight for, especially when publishing professionals have already had to fight so hard for their seat at the table in a highly competitive climate. 

As a marketer for an institutional open-access publisher in the social sciences, studying for a level 6 apprenticeship in Marketing Management has been an enriching experience that has recalibrated my approaches to marketing in a smaller publishing team.

Training and development should not have to be something that workers should have to fight for, especially when publishing professionals have already had to fight so hard for their seat at the table

While specific apprenticeships and training in publishing are also respectively valuable for building skills and knowledge, studying for a broader marketing apprenticeship and engaging with marketers working in sectors outside of publishing provides an incredible opportunity to pitch products/business to people outside of your immediate audience and reach for language that does not assume a baseline knowledge.

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