Thanks for the comments, I appreciate it. From one of your recommendations I looked up Ron Beaufort who provides the good PLC training. I called just to ask a question or two about the 5 day class he offers and I ended up on the phone with him for a good while as he had read my post here on the forum and ended up giving me some of his thoughts. For the possible help of future readers in my position I'll try to summarize his points. Ron, please jump in if I haven't quite covered something right. In his opinion he would rather not see me spend the money and time going through his 5 day class unless I had a strong lead where I was fairly sure it would be used. He would not want to go through it all, then end up taking a job like my past ones that wouldn't use any of it. In addition he has 3 flavors of the class tailored to the 3 main types of PLC out there (old, established P1540) and 2 others, one especially that might be seen in new designs). In my situation, which one to choose would be a gamble as I do not have a particular job or company in mind. He also suggested something I had already planned on doing in addition to posting here and that is to try finding someone in the industry that would be willing to talk to me about the issue. See if their required experience for such jobs could include just training or if real past experience would be required. Last main thing I have here is buying your own PLC hardware for self-study. As someone already posted, the hardware can be reasonable but he said the full software to run it is rather expensive. He did mention you can get a very low end PLC out there that sounded like a small single board solution with software included that is a good starting point for learning the ladder programming but this setup is fairly primitive compared to a unit used in industry and would not prepare you well for many signal types.
