Oh man, can't believe I let this one get by...
I started a thread about this a few weeks ago, but from a different angle. I AM an electrician trying to become a programmer, or work for someone that will allow me to do both.. lol.
Just throwing in my $.02, maybe from the 'bottom up' view. I completely agree with Terry on the 'levels' of electricians. The hard part is, as he stated, to get truly good with this field, you gotta have some gray hairs on the head and from my experiences, it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. These guys know everything there is to know about electrical, but keep it with relay logic and wire wrap, thank you. As soon as you break out a laptop, 'what is that fangled thing?? In my day... (enter story here...)'. Heck, one guy I work with now, and not knocking him, will not touch a digital meter with a 100' pole. They like to say us computer geeks are weird, bah!, it's you electricians
I did take some programming classes with rockwell automation and have about 7 years of programming experience, but it is all with AB plc's. Yes, there has been the occasional fanuc, siemens, koyo, fuji, mitsubishi, ti, etc... but my main area is AB. I started on the AI program with the plc 5's, and worked up to the slc's, logix, etc.. and rslogix program. But, my resume is not being questioned here, how did I get into it?
Believe it or not, it's because I am a computer freak. I was fortunate enough to work a job with 2 electrical engineers that did the programming, but they were a bit lax in the computing area, and how to setup communications from the plc to the pc. These guys spoke fluent octal (Plc 5's), but hexadecimal (memory addresses on a pc) confused them. Literally, one day they had a problem connecting to the plc. I asked if I could be any help, and found out they had a misconfig'd com port for the serial connection on the pc. After that, they taught me plc programs (AI) and I taught them windows based memory and addressing management. I am very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time and not many people are able to be this lucky.
As time went on, I learned plc's with electrical. To me, they were one and the same. I actually learned plc logic before relay logic. Kind of putting the cart in front of the horse, but I found it a lot easier to learn this way vs. the other.
Also, in my limited view of the world, the only place that offers this as part of a learning 'curriculum' with electrical is with our local union hall. They offer the classes (2 of my cousins are a part of the union) but not too many take them up on it. Even our local hall has seperated electrical from industrial to residential/commercial. Plus, as far as I know, there has yet to be a term for what we are discussing. One that I see is coming out, controls engineer, is starting to make some headway, but not even sure if that's accurate.
As another has posted (Terry again, i think...) human resources personnel are not able to distinguish what qualifications are needed for this type of position. What I have seen with mid size manufacturers is they will offer to train the engineer on site how to program (due to the ability to learn from a book) vs. the grease monkey/electrician on the floor. Plus, almost all (9 out of 10) supervisors I have worked for in the past are completely ignorant on plc's and their functions. They just know that they need them, but no idear why, at least completely why. And, from what I have seen, almost every job that I have come across requires the programmer to have a bachelor's of science in either electrical or mechanical engineering. Um, okay....
Also, from what I have researched in my area, the local schools that offer industrial engineering training do have plc courses, but they are very 'generic'. "this is a plc, this is what it does. This is how to turn it on, this is how to turn it off, and if you have a problem, call the programmer..."
If it helps, one thing that I have noticesd... When I talk to my computer geek friends, and I tell them that a plc is mainly a 'scaled down computer', they pretty much get it. Think about it, the computer you are sitting in front of right now is not very different then the plc you program every day. Your components, modem, is your connection. Your monitor is your display. Your cpu is the brain and a computer cpu is made up of millions of transistors (read, relay). Bit, byte, word, etc.. how the irq's and memory addresses are assigned, etc... they are all pretty much the same. What happens, is most people are used to windows plug and play, and have no idea how the components talk to the cpu. Any old computer user that has had to setup dos memory management will tell you it's basically the same as programming a plc, if they know both platforms.
Sorry, this got a bit wordy...
Hoot