Am I wasting my time?

So my situation is this. I got a job as a conveyor technician about 7 years ago at which point I knew very little about the trade (got the job through a friend). Since then I have taken a course on control circuits at Humber and gotten my PLC & Electromechanical technician certification. I have lots of warehouse experience and some welding tickets and worked as a site to site tech doing service calls, PM's, taredowns installs to a lot of big names company's and have a good working knowledge of Plc panels/components. In other words I consider myself a pretty compident technician. I have a few problems though. like I've mentioned I have my certification in PLC's. I'm currently going over my Plc skills and trying to get proficient at it so I can program most conveyors. The problem is there's not a lot of need for programming skills at my current job. I enjoy Plc programming and would like to be good at it but I would most likely have to find new work to utilize/develop these skills in a real world situation. Are there a lot of company's looking for someone with my skill set or would further education be required to ever expect to find work on this field? I have no idea how to get my foot in the door and not risk biting off more than I can chew. Unfortunately I can't afford much further education and feel like I'm still not properly paid for the skills I have already. I'm trying to figure out if I should just leave my Plc skills as is (a nice little bonus on my resume but not much else) and focus on developing other job related skills or if I should see this thing through. I realize this may be a difficult thing to give advice on but since I have no practical experience as a Plc programmer in the field anu info in this regard could be helpful. Thanks.

There aren't very many jobs where all you do is write PLC programs. The PLC is only one of many components that make up a control system. You'll be better served by getting proficient in all of the pieces and learning how to make them fly in formation.

Get proficient in the electrical portion in your career. let the rest of the trades fall into place. get a job as an electro-mechanical technician at a larger company; they usually have some opportunity to go a little further in controls.

Steve Bailey said:

There aren't very many jobs where all you do is write PLC programs. The PLC is only one of many components that make up a control system. You'll be better served by getting proficient in all of the pieces and learning how to make them fly in formation.

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What other aspects would you recommend becoming proficient at? SCADA, networking, OITs, Operating Systems?

Yeah I suspected that might be the case. I was thinking about studying for my industrial electrician equivalency but the red tape involved was a little discouraging. I doubt that my boss would sign off on everything listed for the hours portion of the apprenticeship. He has every reason to sabotage me in this regard. Getting my CET certification would look good on my resume and not that hard to get but I doubt I'd learn much of value studying for that exam. There's still room for improvement in terms of developing my electrical but I'm not sure what the most efficient way of doing that is. Also the ministry of trades is frustratingly vauge on what exactly I'm allowed to do in terms of electrical given I'm not a licensed electrician. I have very little knowledge when it come to hydraulics and they're used in most conveyor system. I'm not really sure what to do. Part of me says I've done enough and I should just look for a higher paying job and be done with it. I'm and artist/musician and those skills have been ignored for long time simply because I'm in desperate need for some financial security. I'm open to suggestions. I'm kind of at a cross roads now and don't really know what to do. I just know my time is precious so I want to spend it wisely.

Also I was thinking about carreer counciling but it's crazy expensive (1200$). That feels like a risky investment given my current circumstances. That's part of the reason I started this thread. I was hoping It might reveal some things abut the industry that would help me move forward.

About the only jobs that are strictly PLC related are engineering or systems integration jobs. I am actually a "Controls Technician", I do work on alot of controls/instrumentation, but I get pulled into all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with PLCs.

I started out there as an Industrial Maintenance Mechanic, but when I demonstrated that I could work on Electrical/VFD/PLC issues, the door was opened. Now I'm responsible for more than 40 PLCs, with I/O and devices all over the place and a segmented, routed control network that seems to increase in size with every project. Ugh!

Yeah, it sounds like finding the right company to work for might be my best bet right now. What's a controls technician? Does that differ from and automation technician?

If I had to guess, they sound like about the same thing. You mentioned that you work on a lot of conveyors, are any of them variable speed with say a VFD and an analog speed reference coming from a PLC module? that would be a good thing to learn how to work on.

I have also seen quite a few jobs that are "Maintenance Electricians" where the qualifications clearly list numerous PLC troubleshooting skills, along with electrical wiring and VFD set up.

I would avoid the term "Controls Engineer", The company I work for does have Controls Engineers, but these positions are all held by degree holding Engineers, many of whom are state licensed, some are licensed in multiple or many states. When I hear the term "Controls Engineer" from someone applying for a maintenance position, that's a red flag.

I definitely know the basics of VFD's. They use them at most of the sites we service. My co-worker usually does the service calls with those. He really only knows how to switch them out and save/reload the parameters. Generally speaking we never usually have to do much more with them. In terms of understanding every single parameters there's a lot I don't know, but I can't really toy around with the customers VFD's for fear I'd muck it up and cause downtime. That's my biggest complaint about this buisness. It's hard to learn certain things comprehensively without putting your head on the chopping block from time to time. Every now an then you find a company willing to soak money into training but I don't work for one of those company's.

What other aspects would you recommend becoming proficient at? SCADA, networking, OITs, Operating Systems?

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All of the things controlled by PLCs such as but not limited to, VFDs, motors, pneumatic and hydraulic valves.
All of the machine-mounted sensors that get wired to PLC inputs such as limit switches, proximity sensors, photoelectric sensors.
Safety controllers and their associated components.
Motion controls, servos, steppers.
Industrial networks like Profibus, Profinet, DeviceNet, EthernetI/P, Moddbus TCP, HART, BACNet.
And many others.

I'm still a little rusty when it comes to all the industrial network stuff. Can you recommend some reading material or a way to become more familiar? Some of that was touched upon in my Plc course but I didn't walk away feeling like I could apply any of that knowledge to any of my sites. Perhaps if I reviewed it again I might pick up on some stuff.

Mrplc:) said:

I'm still a little rusty when it comes to all the industrial network stuff. Can you recommend some reading material or a way to become more familiar? Some of that was touched upon in my Plc course but I didn't walk away feeling like I could apply any of that knowledge to any of my sites. Perhaps if I reviewed it again I might pick up on some stuff.

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Why not start with learning the networks and control equipment that you do have on site? Figure out how it is all setup and why.
Ie. Learn everything Steve Bailey just listed about the sites you have access to.

I'll look into that but I'm not sure how much access I have. We use not local WMS and the IT department handles the rest. I asked IT what kind of Data network we use and mentioned a few of the names off of Steve's list and he didn't know what I was talking about.

In general, IT people don't have much to do with the networks I mentioned. Those are generally for transferring data between devices mounted on the plant floor and the controllers that run those processes. Quite often, but not always, the controllers that run the processes are PLCs.