Career Choices in electronics and PLCs

I have a question about career choices in electronics and PLCs. The current job I have includes a little bit of electronics and PLCs but is mostly mechanical and preventive maintenance of food processing machines. I have 17 years experience in industrial maintenance, including electronics and PLCs. I am currently working on an associate degree in electronics part time while working full time, which will take me 2 more years to complete the degree. I have an interest of troubleshooting and working with electronics and PLCs, in which I also like to learn about them in my spare time at home. With that all said, I am wondering where the best kind of companies and jobs are working with electronics and PLCs in a clean environment for the most part, making decent wages and benefits, with a person like me with experiences and a 2 year electronics degree. If I could get some feedback from the experienced professional who frequent these message boards, about the positive and negatives of their career choices in electronics and PLCs. I am just looking for some advice in planning my future after I am done with school in 2 years. Thank you all very much for your help.
Sincerely:
Maintenance Man

I would like to know the path that led you all to your currant jobs.

Most food,electronics and Plastics Manufacturing jobs are clean for the most part and from my personal experience have a high degree of automation.

Depends a lot on the size of the facility and how complex the process is. Some places just need a guy who can do lite plc work and contract the major stuff and some places need full blown control engineers on staff.

We are setup for 2 Mechanical engineers and 2 electrical engineers and one engineering manager.

We have a maint dept with 42 members. Our site is a little over 3 million square feet and it's packed out.

We have a little over 800 plc's and countless HMI,robots,process controlers and valves,etc.

In a place this size automation work is all that i do because there is not time for anything else.

The bigger the site the better if that's what you want to spend your entire day doing.

I am only 19 and this is only the 3rd job i have had so my experience is limited but thats my advice.

Thank you very much PLC kid. I work in a medium size plant where they want the maintenance people to know a little of everything. I do the PLC and electronics when needed; but most the time just do PMs on machines. We have two large plants, and two smaller plants in the town I live, in which I hope they will someday want some people to maintain the PLCs and electronics for all the plants. I guess I just need to find a job after I am done with school in a large plant of some kind. Thanks again for your answer.

Sincerely:
Maintenance Man :nodi:

I got into automation by working for OEM machine builders. I am trained as a machinist. I started working at my first machine builder as a machinist. Soon I was working in the build area doing the grunt work. Drilling holes to mount stuff, building pneumatic manifolds,pulling wire and anything else involved in the assembly of a machine. I got laid off from that job and went into construction for 8 years. When the construction business went to hell in the early 90'S I went to work at another OEM. After a few years there I joined the service dept supporting the engineering staff in the field. There I learned about PLC hardware and programming. I worked for 5 years traveling around the world setting up and troubleshooting automation systems. This was a great experience. When I got tired of traveling all of the time I went to work with a Robot manufacture based in Europe supporting their US installations. I did that for 8 years.By that time I was really tired of travel so I went to work for one of my customers in a facility with 35+ robots and a ton of automation.I did all of the design, programming and building of automation in house. Now I am the only controls engineer for a small OEM in Michigan. I am doing all of the controls work here. From design to programming. It was a big move for me because I do not have degree.

The Plc Kid said:

Most food,electronics and Plastics Manufacturing jobs are clean for the most part and from my personal experience have a high degree of automation.

Depends a lot on the size of the facility and how complex the process is. Some places just need a guy who can do lite plc work and contract the major stuff and some places need full blown control engineers on staff.

We are setup for 2 Mechanical engineers and 2 electrical engineers and one engineering manager.

We have a maint dept with 42 members. Our site is a little over 3 million square feet and it's packed out.

We have a little over 800 plc's and countless HMI,robots,process controlers and valves,etc.

In a place this size automation work is all that i do because there is not time for anything else.

The bigger the site the better if that's what you want to spend your entire day doing.

I am only 19 and this is only the 3rd job i have had so my experience is limited but thats my advice.

Click to expand...

@ bold.

19? When did you start working. 19 i was still in college. btw i am 23 now and this is my first job.

Weekend and Summers when i was 15 doing electrical and i did a short stint in another plant before the place i am now. I am in college at georgia tech working on my EE degree. I have a scolarship but i have to work also to keep a car and other things.

My father passed when i was in 10th grade so i try to help my mother with money also as she still has my younger sister to take car of.

My grandpa used to own a electrical contracting company and i always worked summers with him since i can remember until he passed and my uncle ran the buisness into the ground thats how i got into this stuff in the first place.

But thats my background. I am just thankful for good teachers and the people on this site otherwise i would not be sucessfull in what i am doing.

The Plc Kid said:

Weekend and Summers when i was 15 doing electrical and i did a short stint in another plant before the place i am now. I am in college at georgia tech working on my EE degree. I have a scolarship but i have to work also to keep a car and other things.

My father passed when i was in 10th grade so i try to help my mother with money also as she still has my younger sister to take car of.

My grandpa used to own a electrical contracting company and i always worked summers with him since i can remember until he passed and my uncle ran the buisness into the ground thats how i got into this stuff in the first place.

But thats my background. I am just thankful for good teachers and the people on this site otherwise i would not be sucessfull in what i am doing.

Click to expand...

And i was thinking Life is tough for me. Sad to hear your story. Very inspirational though. This is my first job and so i visit this forum everyday. I hope one day i will be successful

Thank you all for your help.

Maintenance Man said:

I would like to know the path that led you all to your currant jobs.

Click to expand...

Destiny misled me into automation.


===
Last summer I borrowed a digger for some days to fix a bit around the houses here. It was more destructive than constructive, but believe me THAT WAS REALLY, REALLY FUN!
(So now I told you what I want, what I really, really want )

Kalle

PLC Kid you should be fined and arrested for engaging in economic gain at the age of 15. It's unconscionable that people would allow you to do that. Instead of enjoying your childhood until you became 26 years old, you went out and developed a set of skills. It's not right. You don't have the right to do that. In fact, you probably stole opportunities away from others who needed that work to feed their families... you should be ashamed of yourself!

Good job

Yep i did start young but that is just the way we were raised. My grandfather always made us work since i can remember but we had a lot of fun just doing that. You did not sit around with him too much as he would find you something constructive to do. I made the mistake once of telling him i was bored and boy did he fix that.For the rest of the day i was a lot of things but bored was not one of them. His cure for boredom was chores.

A lot of people my age that i went to school with are real lazy. You could give them a bag of money if they would just walk across the street to get it and many of them would tell you to keep it because they have someone else supporting them.

Maybe it's just me but it feels good to get paid for something that i did and can take pride in.

I am just thankful that i had people in my life to teach me a good work ethic.

In this plant i started out as a operator and that lasted for about 2 weeks then they had me in the maint dept. Once they saw what i could do i have been doing the EE duties ever since as the EE they had took another job right after i started as a operator.

Never met the guy but boy did he leave a mess that i am still trying to get cleaned up.

I primarily do project stuff here and break downs when no one else can or will try to figure it out.

My work hours are around school so the company supports me well as far as that.