PLC education

I'm in college and I'm trying to come up with a model program schedule that will allow me to become a PLC programmer and I was wondering if anybody had any information reguarding any classes that I should take.

Why are you asking here instead of looking in your college's catalog?

The best way to become a PLC programmer is to write PLC programs. Even if your college's School of Engineering offers a course in PLCs, you won't get enough experience in a single 3-credit course to convince any prospective employer that you can do anything more than spell PLC.

IM<HO, you should be pursuing a degree in engineering. Engineering is the application of the sciences to real-world situations. You should be learning the principles of the sciences so that you can recognize the underlying mechanisms at work in the systems you encounter in the workplace. You should be developing a healthy respect for what you <b>don't</b> know so that you can build a margin of safety into your designs.

You should also be taking courses outside of the technical realm, in the arts and humanities. The majority of people don't see the world through an engineer's eyes, nor do they process information in quite the same way as an engineer. You'll be dealing with more non-engineers than engineers in your lifetime, so if you want to be a successful human being as well as a successful engineer, you need to be able to function outside of your rather narrow area of expertise.

The PLC is just one of many tools available for automating manufacturing processes. If you want to become a practitioner in the field of automation, you need to be able to work with all of the tools available. You would severely limiting yourself if all you could do was program PLCs. Automated systems also incorporate motors, hydraulics, pneumatics, and sensors, to name just a few.