Necessary Skills Automation Engineer

- Being able to handle 10 people looking over your shoulder while you try to figure out why the machine stopped, or wont start.

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I can relate to that. My first job out of the navy was programming embedded systems. Not PLCs. I said the boss radiated impatientness. Back in 1980 we had 8 inch floppies and 8080 micro controllers for compiling programs. It sometiems took 15-30 minutes to compile a big program. You could hear the heads of the floppy drives go up and down as it switch from floppy A, which had the system and all of the development tools" to floppy B which had the source code and the complied .obj files and image files that were eventually burned into E-PROMS. Each E-PROM took about 3-5 minutes to burn and there were often 8 of them.

You guys don't know how good you have it.

Ah... Those were the days, place the operating system floppy in the drive, go & have a coffee while it loaded it, everytime you typed some code wait a couple of minutes while it wrote it to disk, compile it, go & have lunch, come back to find it failed. I think in those days it was the superbrain system that seemed to be prominent. then came the hard disks lucky if you got a 10mb drive. My first laptop was a Zenith, dual 3.5 floppy, then one with a 10mb hard disk. I think they were about £3,000

Necessary Skills Automation Engineer

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I would like to edit that....

Necessary Skills for a Great Automation Engineer

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Just about anyone can be an "Automation Engineer" but to be a 'great' one is a different story, I think there are a few skills that you need to know to be considered 'great', back in the day... I worked with some that had the ability to learn on the fly, they knew they did not know everything but they were not afraid to work on something new and enjoyed getting out of their skin and not being comfortable


1) Learn as you go and love it
2) Have the ability to figure out the 'why and what' on a system you have never seen before
3) Know a little about everything (be exposed)
4) Be self motivated
5) Dont get stagnant, have the guts to find a new job once you get in the 'grind'
6) ......

Some of these things are life lessons that you will need to pick up on your own, they can not be bought or taught but if you can acquire them you will be better off and a 'great' Engineer

Oh and two more... be able to 'eat crow' every once in awhile and laugh about it, then the most important one, know how to sweep the floor and empty the trash.

Point of my post is, the most important thing is your attitude, the 'skills' will come.

geniusintraining said:

...
Point of my post is, the most important thing is your attitude, the 'skills' will come.

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One of several excellent posts here on the many non-automation soft skills (as @Tom Jenkins calls them).

The point of education is to learn how to learn. The rest is in the noise.


For hard skills, I would rank highest the ability to understand a process. A process changes over time; understanding how fast the different part change, and how they interact with each other, is a critical skill, because it allows you to focus on the big things first and get a prototype model in your head, then deal with the stuff around the edges later.



For automation-related hard skills, I think it is useful to categorize and rank the kinds of problems that come up in this forum (and others_: networking and moving data around a network (TCP/IP, CIP, E/IP, Profi-whatever, OPC, Modbus, etc.) is probably #1; digging into what firmware versions work together is probably #2; getting the HMI to do summat fancy, probably related to networking, is probably #3; connecting wires to a PLC and programming the PLC are (sadly, for the bitboy ) a distant #4. From on the concept of Survivorship Bias (cf. here), the lower-ranked items are likely the ones persons in the industry probably have down solid and don't need to come here to solve; they represent a baseline of knowledge you need to have. To shine beyond those basics, find out how to solve the higher-ranked problems.

Tom Jenkins said:

The most important skills are what many call "soft" skills. You will pick up the electrical and electronics and software knowledge others have highlighted through training and experience. These skills are useless without these soft skills.

- A willingness to put forth great effort for long periods
- Accepting and enjoying challenges
- Persistence
- Cause and effect logical thinking
- Openness to new concepts and ideas
- Curiosity about everything
- Willingness to look stupid when asking questions
- Willingness to make mistakes and learn from them
- Unflinching optimism that you will eventually make things work

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Well said.
My 'simple' example is two things; in balance:
Hubris: The thought that you can fix anything.
Humility: The knowledge that you don't know everything.

jdbrandt said:

Humility: The knowledge that you don't know everything.

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I have told people my standard 'idiot test's to ask someone that if I gave him an unlimited budget (like billions) could he build me a rocket to get me safely to the moon and back. [Although the 'back' trip isn't planned]



I am smart enough to know that I can't. Plus no single person at NASA has the ability to - otherwise the staff at NASA would be 12 people, not 8,000 or more.


And I have worked with people I asked that I didn't think could tie their own shoes tell me they could.