Sign in to follow this  
Followers 0
bradner

A career change to PLC programming in your 40's?

7 posts in this topic

Hi everyone. I work in a food processing facility in the production floor and have been for the past 12 years. Nothing too fancy as far as my work is - just putting milk in a bottle. I've always liked computers and am intrigued by the PLC people my company hires to do its projects. I'm wondering what someone needs to get into this as a career. Do I need first an electrical engineering degree (the guys I've met seem to have electrical tickets - not necessarily engineers)? My current education is I finished high school and I have a 2 year food science degree from the early 1990's. No programming or electrical background. I'm in my early 40's now and wondering if I've missed the boat for this career... From my limited work experience, I see the food industry getting more and more PLC orientated. If my company has to outsource PLC programmers they obviously need one. I highly doubt they would give me a leave of absence for a couple years to get a degree. (I'm not even sure what exact training I need yet). I've asked what the programmers roughly make for a living but they never say. Is it possible to make over $50,000/year in the field? If so, whats a typical range? - I'd guess 50-75,000/year as the electricians make in my area. I feel I have a good skill set for the food industry as I do understand the fundamentals of how a bottling plant works - at least I can "speak" their lingo so to speak. If I could do PLC programming I would really be an asset in the food industry! Pardon my ignorance to the education part of it but thats why I'm here asking some of you. I am up in Vancouver, Canada & I'm going to look at BCIT (a local trade school) to see what they offer but it likely is a full time program and unfortunately I can't cut my income to zero right now so what would be a good first learning step or steps or honestly do I really need to hit it full time at school? Thanks everyone in advance for any input! <edit>: IF I wanted to keep working at my current and try to learn PLC's on my own - can anyone rattle off a few books to start with? Remember I have no real knowledge of PLCs right now. Thx again! Edited by bradner

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Welcome Bradner. First off, its not too late. You could change careers and still enjoy 25-30 years. First off, I would suggest you take a look at the home page of this forum http://www.mrplc.com there are several PLC training links there. Also, http://www.plcs.net/ has some introductory training material. Take a look at these to get a general idea of what you are getting into. Also, browse the forums to see what kinds of project people are involved in. Next, you will need some education. I recommend that you take at a minimum some basic electrical courses and a few computer programming courses at your community college. A couple of ordinary programming classes will help you write better programs just because they teach you program organization skills. Besides, if you get into HMI programming (operator interfaces) you will need to know more than just PLC languages anyways. See if your community college or trade tech has an electrical automation program. Now where you want to take your career will have a lot to do with how much education you want to pursue. If you want to get into electrical maintenance and basic PLC programming then some trade school training will take you a long ways in a very rewarding career. But it you want to get into serious design on new machinery and plants, then an engineering degree is the way to go. Find out what educational incentives your employer offerst also - they may just pay a part of your tuition.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Hi Bradner; Welcome to the forum. I'm up in Prince George, BC myself! Hopefully you'll find herein some insights to your dilemma, and your opportunity. I have recently quit my job in the pulp industry, as a production worker on the floor level of a pulp mill packaging department, and now work full time as a consultant designing equipment and PLC control strategies for several industries. As yet I have no degrees, courses, or formal training. This was not an easy process to work through, or an easy decision in some ways to move to full time programming/design work. I have been running my company part time, on days off and holidays for 8 years now, and it took that long to build the reputation and customer base to quit the 70,000/year day job. I find this website and its reasources invaluable, as my lack of formal training and ignorance in some of the basic areas does crop up at times, and this forum has helped with that greatly. What I have found is that my operational foundation and love of code writing makes some of the more difficult aspects of this profession easier, so it more than balances out. Do take Alaric's suggestion and peruse this site's many resources for learning PLC programming. There are plenty of very knowledgeable people here. I have seen great comments and wisdom from BobLFoot, and Crossbow as well, just to name a couple more. Code writing itself is an extension of understanding the process, and then translating that into the boolean flow. If you understand the process really well, learning to program is just learning another language, another syntax for describing that sequence of operation. There are critical elements in the application of that description to do with safety and interface, but I'll talk more about that below. One of the factors that determines if programming is a good career for you is if you love the challenge so much that it doesn't feel like work. I can write code for many hours straight, and the creative process energizes me for more. The satisfaction of seeing a complex program going live, watching a machine cycling, changing, reacting and producing in harmony with the strategy you have designed makes it all worth it. Seeing an operator smiling and nodding, and the surprise on their face when the system does something sophisticated and intelligent that they did not expect - that's a real treat. I bet you know as well as I how hard it is to impress an operator... Another factor is whether or not the industry you intend to work in at first has programming needs that aren't being met. That includes whether or not the current companies or people that are available to them are able to deliver the kind of programming expertise and performance they need. I typically find that PLC systems and control strategies are not being used nearly to potential. (It's amazing what operators can learn to live with!) Once you have a reputation within your industry and command of programming interface, you may find work in others, but that would most likely be years down the road. It would be beneficial to begin with the one you know so well, because that will make many aspects of the programming process easier at first. The trend in production is always toward automation, so the need for skilled programmers will increase in all industries, especially with HMI and other forms of advanced control becoming so inexpensive lately. As an example, I recently converted a forty year old Russian steel milling machine to PLC control from its original relays and amplidyne, a job that cost about a third of what it would have ten years ago. This sort of opprotunity will crop up more and more, as companies want to improve a machine that represents a large capital value of infrastructure, but has antiquated control systems that limit its productivity. With PLC systems and drive control products dropping in price so dramatically, these sorts of projects become economically viable. There is another critical aspect of prpogramming to do with operator interface, which is why I refer to writing code for a PLC as a control strategy. I'm not sure how similar it is in the food production industry, but everything in the heavy industrial plants I work in is big horsepower and high pressure, usually more than capable of tearing itself, its surroundings, and any person caught in its path to bits, in a instant. There are plenty of machines that, in an area safety tour, the guides refer to simply as "instant death". The work environments and hazards to employees play a huge role in my code design, as people are always in close contact with the heavy products being produced and the machines that manipulate them. In this area, 20 odd years of operational experience is a huge plus, and I would guess that for yourself that would be true as well. That said, you still MUST have a great love for programming, and solid grasp of the concepts, strengths and limitations of a PLC system, and all its sensors. When a machine goes awry, and people need to correct it, your operational knowledge should help to design a strategy for interface to make that job safer and easier. With the extra complexity of HMI thrown in, and all its plusses and minuses, you really do need a solid foundation of what's important to the operator. I have seen so many poorly wrought interfaces that obfuscate the process and confuse operators with needless data and tiny, redundant controls. Always remember that in a manual workplace, mistakes in code writing can have utimate consequences. As an operator, and being harshly realistic about the process you see, ask yourself if there are areas for significant improvement around you? And are they likely to exist throughout your industry, or are they isolated? What scale of project or change would it take to correct them? For you to make a living at this, you need to have enough market to service - and that market has to be profitable enough to support you. Everything that is worked on is either a maintenance job to keep equipment up to snuff, or a capital improvement, which must be justified by a return on the investment to achieve it. You need to know what it will cost to make specific improvements, and what the real economic recovery from those improvements will be. The pulp industry expects repayment in production cost savings on their investment within 6 to 12 months. Again, since you work directly in your industry, you have some easy avenues to filter through the dramatic soapbox speeches and find the real answers to those questions. These are the biggest hurdles to success for an independant contractor, working without a large company, and their muscle, behind you. It is more critical than your individual programming ability, or how smart a businessman you become. In terms of selling yourself, one of the first things I learned was that no one will write a purchase order for an idea, no matter how great it sounds. If they don't believe strongly in the results it can produce, and your ability to deliver them, they will not likely take a chance with their career by taking a chance on you. Gaining and holding the trust of the people you want to work with is vital. They must learn that you will be a positive, consistent deliverer of solutions, and those solutions must be to problems they perceive they have. It is very difficult to walk into a plant and tell someone you have no history with that part of their process doesn't work right. Believe me, I did that very thing - foolishly - for a while, and got no results. Strange, but not everyone seemed to share my enthusiasm for criticizing their workplace... imagine that? It's a delicate balance sometimes, to convey that something is an opportunity for improvement when there are people in the plant, possibly in room, or even the very person you are speaking to, who are emotionally invested in the process you are undressing. If you find yourself in that position proceed with caution, and focus on the end results, not making the most of the problems you see. I hope that gives you a smattering of the idea as experienced by your's truly. The short answer to "can I quit my job at 40 and start a PLC company" is yes, done carefully and with a good idea of the goals and markets available. I'm 42, and recently unemployed myself! Feels good too! Speakerman

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Outstanding post, Speakerman.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Did actually enjoy reading that, nice post

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Hi, never is too late to learn PLC, I started learning PLC 2 years ago, I'm almost 50 years old. One thing that really help me out is that I have Electrical Engineering background but you do not need a college degree to become a PLC Technician. Most Universities or colleges do not offer PLC as a program but they do have some Automatic Control classes and Robotic classes where they include PLC as a general topic, therefore I'd suggest you to buy some self training PLC kit from Allen-Bradley, or from ebay. If you have you High School degree or you GED you could enroll at some Comunit College or Vocational School and start taking some Electrical Engineering Technology courses. Good Luck.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites
Bradner, Sounds like you might be at the Dairyland plant in Burnaby - fairly handy to the BCIT campus. Did you get your food science degree at BCIT? Incidentally, you do BCIT a great dis-service by referring to it as a "trade school". As an alumni (Electrical & Electronics 1968), I know that their reputation is the envy of many other schools across Canada. I'm not up to date with their calendar, but they most likely have part-time courses. You'll want a solid grounding in math and physics. Get some basic E & E knowledge. Take as much control theory as you're able. After that, the mechanics of getting a program into a PLC is learn-by-doing. A very large part of any control project is knowing what you want to achieve and why. This requires process knowledge. Then you have to figure out how. This is where you get to use all the theories and more process knowledge. Then, the fun part is implementing the plan in the PLC and making it work. There's plenty of scope for automation in dairy factories - some of the largest ones in the world are here in New Zealand and they keep a lot of people busy full-time.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!


Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.


Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this  
Followers 0