David O’Brien, who worked at Cengage Education for ten years, has just happily retired after 30 years in the publishing industry. First trained as an accountant, David talks with the APA about when he first entered the publishing game, way before the internet, and when marketing was done by direct mail. Also discussed is the need for a balance of digital / hard copy products to satisfy the goal of educating the nation.

'I commenced life in the publishing world with a small privately owned company called Centre for Professional Development in 1988. CPD was a highly profitable small business of 20 staff that produced loose-leaf manuals for Accountants and business people across a number of business topics such as The Accountant’s Manual; HR Practice Manual; and Model Financial accounts. This was all pre-internet and even pre CDROM!

CPD was sold in 1990 to The Law Book Company, a subsidiary of The Thomson Corporation.  I started as General Manager under the owner pre-sale and was promoted to CEO in 1991 after the owner left.

CPD was a wonderful business that enabled you to create new products quite quickly.  As sales of Manuals were almost all through direct mail marketing, you found out about success (or not) very fast. 

Renewals of paper based updates created a wonderful profit margin.  Professional people required up-to-date information whenever they needed to undertake a calculation, be aware of tax law, lodge a return, calculate a termination payment etcetera.

CPD ‘sold’ a kind of insurance – nothing they published was a rollicking great read per se – BUT when you needed to use any of the manuals, you wanted to be sure or have confirmed the correct answer or approach to an issue. Remember – at the time there was no internet to google for a thousand hits on the specific matter you needed an answer to!

CPD was a wonderful time of publishing almost whatever we wanted, when we wanted, and we found success with a small team of accounting professionals who edited professionally written content.  We organised all sales and marketing, distribution and subscription management.' First business lesson learnt – never underestimate the ‘power of apathy’ when it came to business people spending company money.'

Your last position was as Vice President of the School Division at Cengage Education. What was your journey to there and what has been your greatest learning in your time working with schools?

'Across my time with CPD, then with Thomson in professional reference and legal publishing, then Reed Elsevier and finally with Cengage, I worked under a couple of key mentors and honed my management skills as a consequence.  I have sought to ‘boil down’ a management approach to literally 10 words across 4 tenets: Work as a Team / Share Knowledge / Make Mistakes / Have Fun.

Working in the K-12 Schools marketspace, there is nothing particularly novel, original or sexy – but sharing knowledge is I believe the greatest advantage of a successful manager and legacy to look back on. The way I have tried to explain to my managers across the last 20+ years is:

• We are surrounded by Data.  Any individual data point on its own is sort of useless
• Cluster or group numerous individual data points together and you move to a piece of Information.  Still in isolation, a strand of information doesn’t tend to help that much
• Bring a number of strands of information together and you start to develop Knowledge on a particular issue / matter/ market/ competitor.
• And when you share Knowledge and gain the benefit of many – you are more likely to move to Wisdom – and that combined with experience and capability across your team will likely give a greater edge than your rivals who don’t practise such knowledge sharing in a deliberate and concerted approach.'

What have you learned to be the value and importance of educational publishing overall?

'I’ve learnt that fundamentally people who work in education publishing seriously love what they do, they value the product they help create as something that adds to ‘the educational capital of a country’. 

Doubtless most other markets have super passionate people working in them, but education is so often seen as an honourable industry.  Perhaps it is as simple as the parental instinct that takes over – many staff have kids at school or naturally have been through school themselves and they have a starting appreciation of the work teachers do and the intrinsic value of the resources they use.

I have seen firsthand the lack of understanding within Government of what education publishers do and the importance to the overall education outcome. To me education sits atop a three legged stool – infrastructure (physical school and facilities); teachers; and resources that match government driven curriculum outcomes.  Without any one of the three ‘legs’ the education result for 4 million students in Australia is severely compromised. 

Published print and digital teaching and learning resources represent around 3% of the total investment in K-12 education each year and mostly it is just taken for granted.  Of course, the costs involved for infrastructure and teachers must represent the vast bulk of education spend but that doesn’t diminish the value of that 3%! I suggest its leverage to the educational outcome of those 4 million students is substantial value-for-money.

Despite this value, governments rarely if ever talk to education publishers or seek advice from the APA yet the quite small publishing industry would in totality talk to teachers in the classroom more often every school day that the combined staff wortking in the Government education depts. The industry has a very strong and contemporary handle on how teachers teach and students learn across K-12 and for almost every subject in every State and Territory.'

In the lead up to the EPAAs, what contribution do you see the awards make to the education sector?

'The awards – though somewhat inward looking -- are a celebration of the Schools and Tertiary publishing industry and recognise all the excellent and creative work that is undertaken by what is frankly a quite small industry. 

I seem to recall the APA some years back determined that the Schools publishing industry has no more than 1000 staff who combined provide a plethora of brilliant fit-for-purpose teaching and learning resources for 300,000 teachers and 4 million children. 

The EPAAs are a rare annual showcase of what the industry does and is important for the staff who work in it that we appreciate the quality and value of what they are part of.'

What has been your greatest career highlight?

'From a sales perspective, I remember my time at CPD when I had to front up to the board of the National Institute of Accountants to seek (beg!) forgiveness on using their membership list for a direct mailing campaign that was not approved and was undertaken in error. 

I’ll skip the discussion and negotiation bit but what started as adversity ended with me leaving with an agreement to provide the full Accountant’s manual (CPD’s flagship product) together with the NIA’s membership rules and such and created their NIA Member’s Handbook which was mandatorily required to be purchased by their 9,000 members. This generated $1m annual revenue stream for CPD (and that was in money terms of 30 years ago).'

You would have seen a lot of changes in your time in the sector. What's been the most positive change you've seen? And the least positive?

The relentless march to digital content and interactivity – has in my view being both the most positive and the least positive impact on Schools education publishing and student learning – obviously in different areas and uses.

Done well -- and it most always is from the Australian education industry -- digital content is a wonderful adjunct to print based resources and in some subjects such as Maths the adaptive learning products do a wonderful job of correctly guiding each student through each concept, in the right order, and at the speed individual students need to grasp the concept confidently. Brilliant value and purpose.

Negatively is where schools / teachers / governments just assume that digital is better and fail to understand the pedagogical markers inherent that often work far better in print format for most students.  And whilst digital tablet devices in Secondary are useful for research they offer up a potent distraction factor. Hardly a revelation yet only recently is there a clear trend for many schools to limit or stop students using tablets during classroom time.

The place for both print and digital in different combinations depending on subject and year level still seems the most appropriate for learning today in my opinion. Digital only in some instances does work well. The education publishing industry produces fabulous resources that meet market needs across all publishing formats and delivery options. Frankly if Secondary is the key yardstick – then very little of the market is digital only and equally very little is print only.  A combination is by far the most common and comfortable approach for the 2,300+ Secondary schools across Australia.'

What would you say to others who are interested in working in educational publishing? How can they find opportunities?

'The most common entry area into education publishing is customer service or editorial assistance where on-the-job training is strong and there are opportunities to move up into more senior roles. Often now there are more entry points into publishing than previously where classroom teaching experience was preferred.  That is not so relevant or required nowadays as is the ability to undertake market research, understand customer issues and interpret curricula. So past experience in sales, in marketing, in digital technology platforms – all are interesting and looked for experiences for education publishing businesses.'

In his retirement David O'Brien looks forward to travelling and spending time in destinations he and his wife wish to go to rather than where work necessitates he travel to.  Mongolia next year and a return to Iceland (for the 4th time) after that are certainly a long way apart from the usual education publishing destinations across his career. We wish him all the best.