Have any of you had a hard time finding...

paradym

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Mar 2003
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Reasonably qualified electricians or technicians that have a moderate PLC skill level???

First let me say "Howdy" to everyone as the "New guy on the block" and jump into my situation.

Been trying to hire an electrician or technician that has moderate PLC skill level for over a year now, keep finding applicants that have only "wired" them and have no programing experience.

Seem that most (Well at least the one's I meet) electrician or technician today are not expanding their knowledge and skills in process controls.

As maybe with others in the field, have any of you come across this also???
 
Oh Yeah

The electricians that I run into on construction projects fall into four categories:

1) Competent to pull wire through conduit, hook up residential wiring, and basic "black to black white to white" - common but not dominant

2) Skilled at hooking up three phase power wiring, low and medium voltage motors, lighting, plus everything in 1 - Most common level I run across

3) Can handle 1 above, most if not all of 2 above, and can read control circuits, understand 4-20 mA loops, and can terminate control, analog, and communications wiring according to a well done schematic - highly unusual, generally underappreciated, often sporting quite a few grey hairs, and seem to include less than 10% of the tradesmen.

4) Can do all of the above, understand why they do what they are doing, can log onto a PLC for troubleshooting, and understand ladder logic - scarcer than hen's teeth. I have only run acoross two that totally fit the bill, and they were brothers.

Note that plant elecricians are, to me, a different category from construction guys. I generally find them less competent on the high voltage stuff, but more versed in analog and controls and ladder logic.

Let me add that, in justice, there is darn little incentive for these guys to push the envelope. The top notch guys don't get paid much more than the fellow just barely competent to carry their tool box. Furthermore, because so many HR type idiots equate technical competence with having a degree and equate building trades with a commodity, there is little chance for thse guys to move up the way their expertise justifies!
 
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Making the jump from electrician to PLC is programming is quite difficult. Not many plants will give their maintenance guys the time spend learning a PLC. As we all know the best learning comes from trial and error. Your best bet is to find someone is able to read and wire from schematics and willing to learn programming. Give a guy a chance.
 
I might also add (while agreeing with the above) That most electricians I meet have no interest whatsoever in plc programming.

That is not a fault, it is how they are made. I have a man work for me who is the best electrician I have ever seen. neat, quick, hard working and professional. But, when he goes home, he has gone home, thats the end of work for him.

I have tried kidding and cajoling him into learning the basics (and others) He just does not want to know. I accept it and respect his wishes.

I think plc programming is a calling, if you are forced into it you will resent it. You must want to do it in the first place.

I am/was an electrician that made the move (because I wanted to) Slowly I noticed over the years that I was coming home with clean hands and my tools were staying in my toolbox for days at a time.

My tool inventory was also getting smaller, ie small screwdrivers, long nosed pliers and a digital meter were all I carried.
 
Will you pay for my relocation to the states and pay me a good salary?

I work with technicians that have all been trained on using PLC's. When it comes to troubleshooting some have great difficulty in finding the problem. Creating programs then forget it, even a basic motor control is beyond some. A small number can design simple programs, an even smaller number could design a complete project from start to finish.
The technicians that cannot program are not inferia as these excel in other areas.
 
Re: Oh Yeah

Tom Jenkins said:
Furthermore, because so many HR type idiots equate technical competence with having a degree and equate building trades with a commodity, there is little chance for thse guys to move up the way their expertise justifies!

I know EXACTLY where your coming from on that statment!!!

jimtech67 said:
Your best bet is to find someone is able to read and wire from schematics and willing to learn programming. Give a guy a chance.

I used to come in at 5 a.m., twice a week for a two hour class to teach all the electricians in my plant PLC's till the my boss put forth "This in not a School" hence with, it came to halt. :(

Goody said:
I am/was an electrician that made the move (because I wanted to) Slowly I noticed over the years that I was coming home with clean hands and my tools were staying in my toolbox for days at a time.

Same here, took a bunch of night classes for 2 1/2 yrs about 15 years back, best time investment ever :)


barnschop said:
Will you pay for my relocation to the states and pay me a good salary?

They don't pay ME a good salery!!! Maybe I should move there, LOL
 
I know quite a few engineers that are former electricians. In short, once they learn the plc thing, people tend to want to do it full time, thus making the transition from tech to engineer. Note that I did not say "move up to."

I have a guy working for me like Goody's. Has most of an EE degree and decided that he did not want the responsibility and pressure. He can wire anything and understand everything about it. But he wants to go home and leave everything at work.
 
Gosh!

For a moment I thought it was a job posting. Trust me! I wont mind being that programmer. A Masters student myself working on PLC as my thesis and given this economy I am dreading if I can land in a decent job when i graduate.

Actually that throws up a very interesting question I have never been able to answer myself...I mean PLC is more logic oriented and I have always assumed Engineering to me more mathematical and design oriented. Do you think with a degree in Electrical Engineering it is good to be interested only in Automation kind of jobs.
 
Hello Group,
I have seen the same thing around here...and I can count the good PLC guys within 50 miles on one hand. We each need to somehow find a way to become a mentor for one or two good people, to help them learn what we do. I guess that I was lucky to have a number of wonderful fellow employees that took me under their wing when I was younger, and instilled a love of all things having to do with a MACHINE in me...My Dad, a farmer next door,many supervisors, etc. Thatcher Glass had the best traing plan I have ever seen: we'll send you to school,you teach me what you have learned, and I'll teach you what I have learned. I don't know anyone in this area that can do the things that I can, and that is because we were submerged in that workplace...you HAD to know wrenching, welding-mig,tig,and stick,high voltage AC,AC and DC drives,conveyor systems,trouble shooting to the component level on PCB's, PLC's and relay and paper tape readers, basic machine shop skills, cut a keyway,broach a sprocket ......And we did that 7on 2 off for years. I think I said it before, of the 6 shift men I worked with, 3 of us became Plant Engineers with out the paper work,tow have started and run their own maint companies, and one ownes a bar in an industrial park in Parsippany (SP?) NJ.

I'm getting long winded....So how do we instill that sense of "Wow, thats a cool Machine" in some of the younger folks that we come in contact with? I have a goal that I attempt to acomplish of nurturing that spark of inquisitiveness that pops up in the eyes of some young person when ever I see it...Prod it a little this way or that, ask a question that they need to ponder on to find the answer, answer any question in plain language, and teach them as much as they can absorb. You may not be able to teach an old electrician to program, but you can teach a young person to want to know how to run wires and hook up motors and program PLC's, because its all so inter-related. I have two folks that fit this catagory...not gear heads, but they are Machine heads...the old adage 'If it aint broke, don't fix it " doen't apply to them...they want to know why it works, so that when it dosn't, they can fix it NOW.Great kids, and I hope to find some more like them before I stop doing this crazy busness that we all are in....INDUSTRIAL living
Hope that I'm not too far off track, and that every one will see fit to become a mentor ...otherwise we may never be able to retire.... beerchug beerchug beerchug beerchug beerchug beerchug beerchug
David
 
Learning Curve!!

Hello all,

I agree with all that has been said so far, and I feel for the ones who have had to (wanted too) learn it all on their own. Two years ago all I new was relay logic and could get online with a TI545 and stare numbly at the screen as the sweat beads popped out on my forehead, and I could barely hear the team leaders asking (loudly) how much longer was the machine going to be down. Then I was put over a brand new line that had things I had never seen before. My boss said he understood there would be a LEARNING CURVE! There are 493 devices that take a program on this line. Some of them are Allen Bradley PLC's, Giddings & Lewis Servo Controllers, Robox Servo Controllers, Device net, Panel Mates, Unidrives, Indramate's, 1336 pulse, 1336 force (1hp-200hp). I will stop listing them; needless to say I wanted to quit my job because I didn't think I could take the pressure. This was our Flag Ship Line and the Mill Manager's baby. But lucky (very lucky) for me, there was an electrician that could work on all this equipment and has the patience of Job. He always lets me try first and go as far as I can, and is always there to pick me up. And when I have a question, I better have read all the help files, researched the problem (checked this board) before I ask him. I spend countless hours at home reading anything I can get my hands on including all the posts hear. I love to read about something and go to work the next day and try it out, what a feeling. I don't feel that my company owe's me anything for all the hours at home I spend learning to work on my equipment. I just love it that I'm getting smarter. Two years ago I felt I could have never learned all the things that I now know. SO, I want to say THANK YOU to all of you that know the answers and are willing to share your knowledge with those of us that really want to learn.

Thanks

Jeff
 
David,

I think there are several problems with Elect-Techs that don't want to get too involved in PLC's.
  1. "Computers"... To some, that is one damned spooky word!
  2. "Math"... too many guys couldn't wait to get out of school just so they could get away from Math!
  3. "Logic"... Way too many guys don't understand that just because a vehicle is Yellow, that does not make it a school-bus! Even if they drive a yellow El Camino!
  4. It's hard. It takes a lot of concentration.
I think that the best way to get a new guy accustomed to PLC's is to give him a small project with a really low-end PLC. Something that is only a "switch-handler" with a few timers. Let him get the feel, and the feeling that, Hey, PLC's ain't so complicated!

Any system that uses a mid-to-higher-end PLC probably goes far beyond "switch-handling"... and so it should.

A lot of potential programmers get scared-off right away by all of those fancy-schmancy instruction things. Things (instructions) that you might see for handling math operations.

I think it's gotta be one of those kind of things where he, the new guy, runs into a problem where he needs to use one of those fancy-schmancy instructions. He might not know that he needs any given instruction but he should know what he's trying to do... then you can say, Oh, Yeah, you can get that by using this instruction. Then of course, he has to read the description. Then he'll run into terms like "Integer", "Real", "Long", etc... If he has the interest, he will bite! He'll dig a little deeper, or he'll ask questions. If not... then he ain't a player... end of story.

Some young guys start on a small bike... it's a confidence thing.

Some young guys like to jump right on that 26", 10-Speed!


'If it aint broke, don't fix it " doesn't apply to them...they want to know why it works, so that when it doesn't, they can fix it NOW. Great kids, and I hope to find some more like them before I stop doing this crazy busness that we all are in....INDUSTRIAL living

I LOVE IT!

I'm a firm believer in the concept of... "If it ain't broke, BREAK IT!"

The worst reason in the world to leave something "as is", is because "that's the way it's always been"!

I don't think I've run into much that couldn't be made BETTER! And the great part is, in our line of work, it can be made better by software only!
 
I was a Navy electrician and have worked in plants for the last 19 years. I did everything I could do to get some type of training with PLC's. I took the only class the local college offered, which is on the A.B. slc100 and ended up with an associates in Industrial Maintenance. I finally got the A.B. school on the slc500 and just wish I could write more programs, as we only need a couple of new programs a year in my plant.
We have a guy that just got out of the air force who wants me to teach him the slc100, and he got me to help him program a micrologix 1000 a few months ago. It would be nice to work with a whole crew who had that much desire to learn...Randy
 
Hi there,

I too made the transition first from construction sites to manufacturing which i found was like a new trade as you don't really deal with controls on construction sites,and then from manufacturing electrician to plc tech,in both cases i found that i wanted to move and learn about controls,plc's and computers of which now i can't leave out of my hands.I was however lucky that our company went through a stage of updating from a lot of relay logic to plc and automated control and had to send us on courses to update our knowledge,i know there are a lot of courses on plc's out there but i found that the system type course of which plc manufacturer you are using was best (rockwell),having said that a lot of the learning curve was trial and error as everybody has a different way of writing their code.I also found that working with relay logic and schematics helped me through the transition much more easier than if i had no electrical knowledge and had came straight from college,at the end of the day i think experience counts for 10 degrees.
 
I work for a major manufacturer in the US north east. When I was hired as an Elect Tech 7 years ago the company tested over 600 people to get 7! Those 600 had already been screen by a job service, passed a standard apptitude test before being selected to take the hands on test. This problem is nothing new....and it won't change any time soon
 
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 :p

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
 

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