Quick Read: I became an automation engineer through a 4-year electrical engineering apprenticeship starting at age 16, combined with self-directed learning, hands-on PLC programming practice, and 15+ years of continuous skill development. No university degree… just persistence and curiosity….
I’ve been asked about my story quite a few times now, and I’ve done a podcast on this already. But I’m thinking I’ll write it into a proper blog post for those that would rather read it….
I never really had any calling to work with PLCs or anything like that from a young age. I didn’t have some childhood fascination with automation or controls. I didn’t even know this world existed, really. I sort of stumbled into the world of engineering and automation through pure chance. When I finished school at 16, I wanted to pursue a career in music technology. I was looking to go to college and do music rigging, behind the scenes stuff, setting up audio equipment. That’s where I thought I wanted to go. Then an opportunity came up that changed that direction for me.
I managed to get onto an electrical engineering college course that was usually reserved for people with apprenticeships at companies, or that’s how it seemed. The government at the time were doing grants that allowed me to have funding for placements on college courses that would typically be used by companies due to the cost. I knew I couldn’t finish the course because my funding would run out when I was 18, and it was a 4-year course and I was only 16/17 at the time. But I thought that 2 years of electrical engineering would probably benefit me in the industries I was looking to go into anyway. So I secured the funding and started the course.
It was quite weird because I was the only person there who didn’t have a company sponsoring them. I remember filling in the paperwork on the first day at college and everyone was talking about “who do you work for?” and “how much do you get paid?” and all that sort of stuff. I didn’t work for anybody. I had a part-time Saturday job at a chemist. My tutor was like “we’ve got to write somebody down, everybody here is an apprentice.” So I just put that I worked for a chemist…
I remember thinking, “I should probably try and find somebody who’s willing to sponsor me for the rest of this course.” I had 2 years to do it.
For the first 8-9 months, I wasn’t sponsored by anybody. Then somebody on the course decided to get themselves into trouble with their company and got let go. He was fired from his position as an apprentice… It’s crazy to get fired as an apprentice! I don’t think people really realise how good apprenticeships are… to be able to be in college learning something that’s going to give you the foundations to build a solid career, whilst getting paid for being at college!? Sometimes the pay isn’t great (I think the government in the UK now have banned you being paid less than minimum wage because you’re an apprentice), but you are still paid for learning, which is something you just can’t knock.
When this guy got fired, I already knew who he worked for. The company was local to me, about 20 minutes away. So what harm would it do sending them a letter to say: “I’m on the same college course as a colleague of your current apprentice, the one you’ve just let go. Is there any possibility (since it’s the first year and we haven’t done any on-site training or anything like that, the first year has been completely done in college) I could simply replace him? We’re at the same point. I would just continue as a first year apprentice with this water treatment company.”
To my surprise, they actually said yes. Come in for an interview. We think that’s a great idea.
I couldn’t drive at the time, I was only 16, so I was driven in by my mum. Looking back now, I’m thinking about it: I sort of walked into this water treatment facility, which was massive. I knew absolutely nothing about engineering, the water treatment industry, or what it would entail. I was more thinking “I need to finish this course, and it’s a 4-year course, and I will come away with a qualification that would set me up for industries that need electricians or electrical work.”
I sat down with the people there, and they explained to me that this was a hybrid apprenticeship. Predominantly I would be controls, but I would also have a multi-skill in electrical. So it kind of shifted the dynamic a little bit, because I was going to end up being an instrument tech with a multi-skill of electrical knowledge. At this point I was sort of like, “That’s fine, because I’m still on the same course and all that sort of stuff.”
I passed the interview, which wasn’t really much of an interview. It was more of a walk around. I was intrigued by things like clarification, the sand filters, GACs, and the sheer size of equipment and volumes of water they were working with… The things they were doing there, generating their own ozone for ozone treatment, everything was just massive and loud, with pumps everywhere, it was busy!
I decided in that moment, at 16, that I really liked the prospect of working in this industry. There was something about walking through the process and seeing water at its dirtiest, brown, river water being extracted on-site, taken through these processes, and coming out as drinking water. Not only drinking water, but the same drinking water that I was drinking at home. There was something that really captivated my attention.
I went and completed my first year at college, this time under an apprenticeship, and I was paid. It certainly looked better than I’d ever been paid before. When I started my apprenticeship in 2007, I was on about £14,000 a year. I was 17 by this time. To be 17 years old, on £14,000 a year, just going to college doing the same thing as all my friends, but without needing a Saturday job and having a lot more money than they did. I never really appreciated the position I was in. Looking back now, I wish I’d saved more. I wish I’d invested. I wish I’d done a lot more with that money other than going up town and pissing it away! I did save, and I did put myself in a stronger position, but I could have put myself in an even better position. But you don’t think like that when you’re 17-18 and going up town with friends and experiencing everything that late teens experience.
In my second year, I started onboarding into my company. I started going to the water treatment sites aside from college, and I was only in college on day release in the second year. The first year was more practical stuff. There was a machinist element to it for some reason, so I had to use lathes and mills and all that sort of stuff. There was an engineering principles section to the qualification that gave me my foundation, and I really enjoyed that side of it. But it only ran for the first year, and then everything was day release.
I was going to work Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and I was on an 11-hour day at college on a condensed day release on Wednesday, which was pretty brutal. It started at 9 and finished at 10pm. Rough. But I really enjoyed that day.
Being an apprentice at the Water Treatment site was amazing, being on-site for 4 days a week really accelerated my understanding of what this maintenance roll entailed.
To begin with, I was doing classic apprentice-style work. I was shadowing a fully-fledged instrument tech, and he was also my mentor. He was a great guy, knew his stuff, taught me all the basics around 4-20mA and all the different fundamentals: pressure transmitters, level controllers, loop powered 4-20, 4-wired 4-20, basic control signals to telemetry outstations, why we use 4-20mA and not 0-10v, why we do use 0-10v for telemetry outstations… Having a dedicated mentor that I was with for the first year, every working day, was absolutely instrumental to where I am today.
We did do basic PLC work when I was an apprentice, but it really only went as far as fault finding. It didn’t go much further than that. We did the odd small modification, but we weren’t sitting and writing code for days. We had really basic laptops that allowed us to connect to some Allen Bradley PLCs, and we had some old Siemens S5 PLCs that I was told “Don’t touch these, ever”.
Predominantly it was Mitsubishi GX and Allen Bradley, those were the PLCs that I cut my teeth on with maintenance.
Most of the time I was doing things like pH calibrations, cleaning the heads of ultrasonics, and basic routine maintenance that they could leave me to either get on with on my own, or get on with whilst someone else was in the vicinity or working in the same area. Low risk stuff for a 17-18 year old.
I became disgruntled by the end of the second year. I’d done a full year at the site and was becoming a bit like “I’m just cleaning stuff and dipping probes in different calibration baths and all this sort of stuff, and I’m at the same site all the time.”
In hindsight, I was a little ungrateful. I probably should have knuckled down a bit more and shown that I was more willing to take on bigger things rather than just doing enough to get by.
Unfortunately for me, that showed in college as well… I was doing enough to just sort of get by, enough for my college to write my employer and say “Liam’s doing enough… but he’s basically just doing the bare minimum.” At which point my company stepped in and told me if I didn’t buck my ideas up, there might not be a job at the end of this… I already knew they would let people go, because they’d done it before to the person I’d replaced.
That didn’t put me in good standing at all, but it was the kick up the arse that I needed to start appreciating where I was. At this point I was coming into my third year of my apprenticeship. I was now on ~£16,000 a year, which was a significant amount of money to me at the time.
I had a girlfriend (that I thought was serious!) and I wanted to do more things, go away, do stuff. I was driving, and I was very aware all of a sudden that if I didn’t have this job, I didn’t have the money to run my car and do the things that I actually needed to do.
So I completely switched tack.
I asked if I could move to groundwater rather than the surface water site. This meant moving from river extraction sites to sites that extract from boreholes. There were a lot more of them. They were a lot smaller, much less going on. Small sand filters, or in-place filters, or some of them didn’t have any filtration systems at all.
But they did have UF membrane plants… Ultrafiltration. Large membrane plants that had complicated controls.
These were mostly brand new. They’d only just gone in the last 2-3 years or were being built at the time. The complexity of them was much more complex than anything the surface water sites had in terms of controls.
I decided it would be really good to get involved with this, learn how these UF treatment plants work. In the future, there was a lot of talk about these plants scaling up and being installed on surface water sites for the final treatment. Although that never happened (or I left this business before that happened), I did learn an awful lot from the UF systems.
I also learned a lot about superchloration and dechlorination on these borehole sites, different ways that we can treat the bacterial side of water. We did do that obviously on the surface sites as well, but it was chlorine gas, and I wasn’t really allowed to get involved in it as an apprentice.
I found myself in year 3 being on my own. I was no longer with a second person all the time. I had my own van and was driving all around the county of Gloucestershire in the UK, just doing the same stuff really… servicing equipment.
However, I became an operator to the sites as well. These are unmanned sites. There’s no one there, and they still need to be looked after in terms of operational process. I was turning up, fault diagnosing, looking at HMIs, finding out why the site wasn’t running, what was wrong with it, manually stepping things through, recirculating systems, restarting the UF plants and where possible, jumping on a PLC and having a poke around.
Over that year, I learned an awful lot about the process, not just the equipment that I was looking after. Being able to learn how to run these sites and what the process actually entails, as well as getting a much deeper knowledge of the instrumentation and a wider sense of what’s out there, was absolutely instrumental to my development.
I became very good with instrument vendors such as ABB, HACH, and Endress+Hauser. I read manuals. I became somebody who wanted to know everything, and someone who was frustrated when I didn’t know something… Not out of any sense of wanting to be the person that everybody came to, or wanting to be better than anybody. If I’m honest, it was actually more out of laziness. I never wanted to turn up to anything and not understand it or know it.
The easiest thing to do is to know things… If I turn up to site and there’s a problem, and I know the instrumentation or I know the control system, and I’ve got notes on it and things like that, it’ll be easy and I won’t be there panicking or worrying about anything. I can just get on with it.
That’s what I did in the third year. I really, really knuckled down in college, and I really knuckled down in understanding what I was working with and I made the transfer to a different area of the business, and that was fantastic for me.
At the end of my third year, I was assigned a new manager who, unfortunately, there’s no other way of putting it, was a complete prick.
For whatever reason, he didn’t like me. We didn’t get on and we clashed. He did everything that he could to derail any sort of progress that I had. He didn’t want me doing faults. He didn’t want me doing control systems. He wanted me running errands and doing basic PPM maintenance tasks, which is what I was doing in my first year.
He also pushed me back to surface water. As part of the area that we looked after, there was one major surface treatment site, and he had me there all the time. I felt very trapped again. Trapped enough in my fourth year that I looked at quitting and leaving, because I really didn’t like the environment I was working in.
I was convinced by parents and friends and others not to leave. I was actually earning about £18,000 a year at this point, which was in 2009 coming into 2010.
I had met a long-term partner at this point, who I would be with for the next 15 years (I didn’t know that at the time). I was thinking “how do I move out from my parents with this girl?”
Mortgages back then weren’t what they are now. They were much easier. I had some money saved, and I had some help from my parents, and it was getting to the point where I couldn’t leave this job, because I actually have the funding right now to go and buy a house. The earlier I get on the property ladder, the better it will be for me in the future.
So I stuck it out for the last year, passed my apprenticeship, and became a fully-fledged instrument tech.
I decided to make the move back to surface water anyway, which was controversial for me. But the site I was going to was being merged with 3 other sites, so it wouldn’t just be one site that I would be on, I would work across the 3 sites.
Critically, I would get away from this manager that I didn’t get on with.
Once I made the move to these sites, the company that I worked for developed our own ICA team (Instrumentation, Controls, and Automation).
Although I was never part of the team officially, I decided to take on a role within the sites that I worked for. I would be an “Unofficial Local ICA Tech”, so we wouldn’t need to call in these people to jump on PLCs and things like that. I wanted to do it locally, and if I did it locally, I would gain an awful lot of knowledge around PLC design and what it takes to do modifications, what it takes to write new sections of code (which is what the ICA team were doing).
There was a chap called Alistair who enabled me to do that. By year 6 of me working there, I had a laptop with the same sort of level of access the ICA had in terms of being able to connect to PLCs. I had software suites that would allow me to write software, and I had access to spare PLCs and things like that that would allow me to write software against, test it, get a feel for it, and make mistakes.
And I did make mistakes. I caused damage…. I broke things…. I introduced bugs that weren’t there before…. I even caused events that were catastrophic at times… including flooding…
I did get pulled over the coals for it. But the team, especially my manager at the time, very understanding that I wanted to better myself and wanted to learn. They made no mistake in telling me that I shouldn’t be breaking stuff, but they also understood I wasn’t breaking it on purpose. There was always a good intention as to what I was trying to do. I was trying to better the plant, tighten down control sequences, introduce new things that would help us, help engineers, help our operators to identify faults.
My big break with it came when we had a public health incident.
The reason why we had that public health incident was actually because our analytical equipment didn’t raise it in a way that was very obvious that it was going to become a public health incident if we didn’t do anything about it.
I developed PLC code and SCADA modifications that would really identify this in a way that it cannot be missed, and it would automatically escalate to the relevant managers or the management level so they were aware that this stuff was going on and could intervene before it became a public health issue.
It was so successful that I was able to visit surface water sites that were much wider in the business, out of my patch, and install these systems there as well.
That gave me the introduction to building systems from scratch, implementing them, deploying them, working with other people, working with people I didn’t know (even though it was all internal in the business).
This was year 7-8 into my 10 years at this business.
I decided once I completed that project that I wanted to do this stuff for myself. I didn’t want to work for a business. I wanted to just do it for myself. That way I would be in control of where I’m going, what I’m doing, and I could expose myself to different systems and things like that.
So I started a company called Alveare.
I started it alongside a friend, he wasn’t involved per say, but he was quite pivotal around me getting the opportunities to go and do this stuff.
Unfortunately, that business sort of failed. I was too young. I was starting a family, and the timing wasn’t very right for me to be able to start the business alongside holding down a full-time job and a baby and a house and maintaining some aspect of a social life and all that sort of stuff as well.
But I did do some jobs with CodeSys and IFM. I got the chance to learn CANopen and Modbus and things like that, and that became absolutely instrumental to my development.
When I decided to leave the water industry and go into aviation and hydraulics, I found that CANopen and Modbus were protocols that I came across all the time.
Working in hydraulics, I was working with engines and things like that, and that was where CANopen and J1939 and all these protocols came in. I’d already worked with this stuff, so I understood what these protocols were and didn’t have to learn them from scratch. That gave me a real head start in these industries.
I went and worked with a startup business. Well, it was a division rather than a business, but a startup division. This division specialised in controls. It was my first job where I was just writing projects from scratch.
I was also introduced to LabVIEW and TestStand, which are National Instruments products, and they completely blew my mind.
I was 26 at this time. I’d never seen anything like LabVIEW. I was definitely winging it. I had no idea what I was doing, but I went on training courses, and I spent a lot of my own time learning LabVIEW.
I found that I never really got to grips with LabVIEW in the sense that I could write amazing code with it… I wouldn’t go back and use it. I would never choose to use it for the stuff a typical automation engineer would use. It’s very analytical, that’s where it shines, It’s very, very fast. All of the hardware is on FPGAs and much faster than PLCs. We’re talking nanoseconds and hundreds of thousands of inputs being processed in single scans. It’s not the same as a PLC at all.
However, it did teach me architecture. It’s where my Asset Oriented design principles come from. They come from National Instruments, because National Instruments is all object-oriented, very OOP controlled. The design patterns are very producer-consumer style control patterns, and I really, really enjoyed having that structure.
Because I was working alongside National Instruments with CodeSys, and CodeSys is also object-oriented (it’s much better now than it was then), that gave me the ability to take principles from LabVIEW and put them into a CodeSys environment. That became very standard for me to write logic in that way.
I didn’t make use of OOP full-fledged, and I didn’t use object-oriented programming all the time, but I did use principles and pillars from it to make sure that my projects were structured.
Unfortunately, this startup division wasn’t honouring the promises they’d made around pay increases and things like that. They were stringing me along. I’d taken a pay cut to go there. I was on ~£33,000 at this point.
I decided that the writing was on the wall that this place was going to fall apart, and I needed to leave.
I finally landed the role that I’m in now, which is working back in the water industry somewhat, albeit effluent, writing projects from scratch on Siemens.
I’d never really come across Siemens at this point apart from the old S5s, so I’d never really worked on them. I decided that Siemens was a hole in my knowledge base, and I needed to plug that hole.
I came and interviewed for who I work for now, and I took that role on. I was in at the deep end straight away because I realised they were using Step 7 Classic, which I’d never even heard of, let alone used… It was difficult to get to grips with at first. Step 7 Classic is clunky software. It was different from anything else I’d used.
I’d written projects from scratch before, but they were not like these projects. The projects I was writing were small. They were for small independent rigs, skid plants, things like that. I had done some work in aviation which was much bigger, but again it was still skid-based. “We’re going to drive it to site, it’s all self-contained”… it has its own dedicated control system, it doesn’t integrate with anything else, has its own HMI….
What this company was doing now, was writing cradle-to-grave full treatment systems that did interface with customers and did have forward and backward-facing protocols that talk to other equipment. It was a big learning curve.
However, it was a significant pay rise and something that was great for my family at the time. It was a long commute (I had an hour drive each way to work, which put pressures on things), but I was pretty determined and adamant at this point that I needed to understand Siemens.
If I understood Siemens and understood Rockwell…. Siemens and Rockwell, and by understanding CodeSys, I understood Schneider… I would have the trifecta of modern and common PLCs in my knowledge corner…
I managed to get onto TIA Portal within the first 2 years of working there and decided that I just got on with TIA Portal really, really well, better than any other development platform I’d ever worked with.
I was a bit disappointed that it didn’t have the object-oriented stuff. However, I decided that Asset Oriented Programming was going to be the thing that I did always.
That’s really where I am now. I do Asset Oriented Programming. I’ve developed standards and things like that and I write software from scratch, and going and commissioning that software when it ends up on-site.
There’s been some big learning curves along the way. Obviously my environment has changed somewhat too… COVID pushed me into working from home most of the time.
But that’s effectively my story of how I’ve got to where I am now.
I think the pivotal thing to understand is that I didn’t get here through just… “oh, you’re so lucky” and “you landed on your feet”… I ended up as a senior automation engineer through learning, through reading manuals, through those late nights of “how does this work?” and “I don’t understand this, I want to understand this.”
I’ve never stopped doing that. I’ve always wanted to learn and understand the things that I see people do online. I’ve always been part of LinkedIn and the community, sharing things and learning stuff, teaching others. I’ve always done all of that stuff.
I think that’s the thing that actually got me to doing what I do today: that relentless “I hate that I don’t understand this and other people understand it.”
There’s no limit to what you can understand. Intelligence isn’t a limiting factor. Intelligence determines how many hours it’s going to take you to understand what’s going on. It helps you absorb information faster, but it doesn’t stop you from learning.
Without sounding harsh, I’ve seen pretty unintelligent people do absolutely amazing things in automation… It’s all down to putting the hours in, learning, testing, learning from mistakes, and developing into somebody who might not be academically gifted but is very, very good at what they do.
I put myself firmly in that category. I’m not stupid, but I’m not clever. I’m not holding degrees here and there and writing whitepapers and things like that. I’m just a normal person who decided that I was going to put a lot of time into the stuff that I do.
My key takeaway from this is: give yourself the time to understand the things that you want to understand, and you will understand them. It will happen. That’s it. That’s how I got to where I am now.
If you found this story helpful or have questions about getting into automation engineering, feel free to reach out. I’m always happy to help people starting their journey in this industry.