After years of back-breaking undergraduate studies, not a few people are just content with going into the labour market to earn a livelihood and keep their lives moving. No doubt, there is the reality to keep body and soul together. Gracious Lord, there are bills to pick! But, as we do this does it mean bidding goodbye to continuing professional development? Continuingprofessional development (CPD for short) is the manure that keeps the plants inour careers blossoming. CPD is vital for enhancing competence, with competencebeing associated with possession of necessary skills, knowledge, attitude,understanding and experience required to perform professional and occupationalroles in the workplace. Since learning and competence are the Siamese twinsthat ensure career advancement, individuals must always strive for continualimprovement. Postgraduate education is one of the many routes to acquiring professional competence. It is a means of developing new skills, as well as a channel to gain in-depth knowledge about a subject matter. It is also an indication of being highly responsive to new challenges. The printing industry, repositioned by digital technologies, has taken a new shape. According to Patrick Henry, a print industry consultant at whattheythink.com, printing has evolved from an industry to a profession. With this transformation, there has been the emergence of a new printing industry – the graphic communications industry. This change is indeed a reflection of the paradigm shift that is turning the tide of job roles in the print industry, with immense implications for career placement and progression. A reference to the prepress segment of print production may come handy. Today,the term “premedia” is catching up fast in usage with respect to prepress. Whilepremedia and prepress are often used interchangeably, they do not, in thestrictest technical way, mean the same thing. Simply, premedia is used in thecontext of visual content production – running the gamut of creation tooptimization of content, especially for digital media. So, with premedia, notall files go to press. On the other hand, the key focus of prepress is creatingand preparing files strictly for print media. Greg, a senior member atprintplanet.com, however argues that premedia is beginning to replace Prepress. According to him, “I work in publishingand have many friends that work at some of the big 6 publishing houses. Inmost cases, in-house prepress job titles have been re-branded to premedia jobtitles. In some cases these roles have expanded to include preparing files fordigital publishing, but they are still mainly working on files for the printededition.” So,while not exactly the same, premedia is a more encompassing operational termthan prepress in the current digital landscape. Premedia entails photographyand digital imaging, creative prepress, digital asset management and dynamicpublishing, all of which fall under the domain of graphic arts. For the purposeof training and development, graphic arts, otherwise called applied arts, fallsneatly into design and technology in the profession/discipline of industrialdesign. Industrialdesign involves the design, development and manufacturing of products thatserve useful purposes in our day-to-day lives. Jerry Emeka Obi, a consultant,explains that the term “industrial design” emanates from designing productsthat are manufactured by industries. According to him the efforts of industrialdesigners are quite ubiquitous. In a similar vein, Dr. Osa-Francis Obasuyi, anexpert in industrial design the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Universityof Benin, informs that key aspects of industrial design include; graphicdesign, product design, interface design, architecture, information design,computer science and technology. Of these, graphic design, and product designand manufacturing are related to the operations or activities of the printingindustry since the main purpose of the graphic arts industry is creatingproducts that communicate visually. Print products like educational materials(books, charts, infographic aids etc.), promotional materials (brochures,catalogs, signage, postcard, flyers etc), packaging materials, and so on aregood examples. A2005 study by a group of researchers on competencies and qualifications for industrialdesign roles indicates that the knowledge and skills required in this field arewide and varied.