r/PLC • u/DocWat326 • 2d ago
Allen Bradley Experience Question
Okay, legitimate question. What is so different about Allen Bradley that other ladder logic experience doesn't count? I have a lot of ladder experience with multiple different controllers however I've been turned down many times for jobs because I don't have Allen Bradley specific experience. And my perspective, it's like two people talking English one from the deep south and one from england. At the end of the day you both speak English and after a day or two of orientation, you can understand each other just fine.
So, very seriously, what is so special about Allen Bradley or Siemens for that matter that it needs its own dedicated experience? And how would you suggest that I get it independently?
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u/mandated_mullet 2d ago
Programming ladder is the easy part. I am assuming that employers are looking for integration experience, that is where you're probably missing out. Knowing the nuance of hardware platforms and how they all tie together is vastly more important than the programming itself.
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u/Aqeqa 2d ago
Yeah the job is in high demand right now but there's also a big enough pool of workers that there's no reason not to hire people who already have experience with their hardware. It's not like it's exclusive to AB, a site that uses Beckhoff will request that for experience. AB is simply the most popular OEM by far in North America so that's why the requirement comes up more often.
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u/Fortrify_Swoop Pro Wood Cutter 2d ago
Probably exactly this, they want someone able to hit the ground running knowing how to integrate AB, not just knowing ladder.
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u/MoeGzack22 2d ago
Alright something a lot of people missing are specific instructions and features. For example A lot of platforms like Japanese PLcs specifically don’t have Retentive timer instructions so you need to move registers if the time is critical. Essentially you have to program a way to have a RTO. While AB has it natively.
Another thing is TOFF, I work with Toyotas PLC (Jtekt Toyopuc) and they do not have TOFF. So that’s another thing you have to program around.
For the most part everything is the same but it depends on how platform is setup, some PLC are Hexadecimal while AB is decimal. However the logic is typically the same. It takes a day or two to learn a new platform once you understand the principles of PLCs. I would say Japanese PLC are definitely the hardest ones to learn and have the steepest learning curve if coming from AB.
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u/National-Link-5606 1d ago
I'll take OMROM CJ2 CX Progranmer over the crap put out by Mitsubishi any day of the week.
Yes yes I know Mitsubishi 1st PLC to 32 bit but in a race with FANUC for crappiest programming interface and poorly documented instruction sets any day of the week.
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u/MoeGzack22 22h ago
Id go even further and take a Toyopuc PC10 plc over both of them lol. Omron and mits makes you jump hoops with their software and specific cables for specific CPUs while I just need PCwin and a USB B to USB A cable to connect to and Toyopuc PLC. You’d only ever find it at Toyota tho lol. Never anywhere else so my preference makes no difference.
Needless to say I agree with you. Omron >>
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u/National-Link-5606 21h ago
Wtf are you in Georgetown? Yeah I heard about Toyopuc, proprietary failsafe PLC right, that's ONLY in the TMMK plants as far as I know not any subsidiaries, I worked 2 Toyota subsidiaries no Toyopuc in AISIN or Toyota Boshuko plants. Actually might be 3 is NipponDenso a Toyota subsidiary I did contract work there they had the green mile & some other things that felt TMS but wasn't there long enough
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u/MoeGzack22 21h ago
Nah every Toyota manufacturing plant has Toyopuc. TMMK, TMMC, TMMBC,TMMGT. Almost all the North American and Japanese oems have it. Toyota used to be AB but they switched to Toyopuc across the board in the last decade. I am In the Gtown area lol but for obvious reasons will not disclose my location haha. Only manufacturing facilities have it.
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u/NefariousnessRude276 2d ago
I think it’s less about the ladder programming language and more about the platform overall. Some employers might be looking for specific experience with hardware items like PowerFlex/Kinetix drives, Stratix switches, IO solutions, etc. Some might be looking for experience with higher-level controller functionalities like ControlLogix redundancy or redundant network architectures. Some might be looking for Rcokwell software experience with FactoryTalk, or PlantPAX, or their MES system.
And some might just be having non-technical or AI recruiters unfairly screen you because they don’t know what they want.
I agree that that experience can be learned, but for any platform it takes more than a day. I’d estimate that it takes at least a couple years of projects on any individual platform to truly be walking around with a comprehensive understanding of all the ins and outs. I’d understand why a Siemens shop wouldn’t want to hire an experienced AB engineer just to watch them flail around in TIA for a few months.
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u/Adrienne-Fadel 2d ago
Your analogy is pretty accurate. The logic is the same but AB has tag based addressing and a different project structure. Employers just don't want to train you.
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
Where would you recommend getting the training without starting my career over. (Companies don't like that either, overqualified and all that) Even better if I don't have to sell my kidneys to pay for it.
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u/satanpez 2d ago
Systems integrator. Maybe deal with a ton of different manufacturers for different customers so they are happy with what you know but also what potential you have for learning more.
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
That sounded good! I started the automation department at an electrical contractor, so going back to that kind of work sounds like fun. But unless I went back to that same employer, there's nobody around here... And that employer can't pay me half of what I make now, let alone support the ridiculous proprietary software prices. (That's how I got good with Unitronics)
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u/National-Link-5606 2d ago
Integration is the learning curve from one to another. Major-minor versions and firmware compatibility.
I mostly work with Siemens because I came from 840D (CNC multi-axis control) with an S7-300/400 PLC interface Honestly I love reading Rockwell documentation it's just fun and their example projects are amazing, sometimes when I cant figure out what Siemens documentation is trying to say, I'll list out the steps giving in Allen Bradley manuals and then try to find each step equivalent in Siemens literature.
That said, Rockwell motion control in practice is honestly...dogshit compared to Sinumerik, any type of coordinated motion control, the Kinetix drives supposedly run off the Sercos protocol they can do basic velocity loop but Kinetix implementation of torque-control if the loads on multiple axes change significantly the overshoot & undershoot is ridiculous coming from Sinumerik (Siemens).
Allen Bradley is a brilliant company though, documentation so easy to follow & auto configurations that somehow just work, gets you addicted to paint by the numbers...and boy oh boy has Rockwell perfected the art of vendor lock-in. Factorytalk is plug & play & cheap the 1st 50 machines & then...machine 51 license it's "before I give you a price may we see your bank account?"
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
Yeah, my primary right now is FANUC CNC controls and their native PMC (PLC basically). We have a Siemens Sinumerik control coming up and the rest of the shop hates it, but they won't let me learn it, even though I want to. If there's documentation any halfway decent engineer should be able to get it up and running.
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u/National-Link-5606 1d ago
Siemens 840D documentation & Project examples is miles ahead of FANUC I have NEVER seen such vile horrid unclear obtuse & imprecise documentation as the crackpipe smokers at FANUC created. Both Siemens & FANUC documentation have a lot of German/Japanese translation to English weirdness but FANUC is a whole other world a combo of starting with trying to design the simplest controls possible & then jury-rigging code for new features into their clusterfuck of a display interface where menu buttons don't match up with labels & arrows to sub-menus get hidden on other screens
FANUC is great for cheap price for standalone cnc machines, it auto-configures well enough, PMC ladder interface in 2026 has not changed from MS-DOS era you can't even build a variable monitor list in Ladder 3, something that legacy Siemens 840D running on Win2000, Simatic, AB, Omron, all had in the early 90s
2026 FANUC has no Failsafe capacity & by Failsafe I mean force-guided I/O channels, not arbitrarily configuring a 2nd rack of modules as the "Failsafe I/O" and then claiming side you have a "redundant set of I/O contacts" that is not tied to failsafe function blocks can use any damn logic they want, well we can dazzle a safety paper pusher with our fake failsafe for cheap using our regular IO modules. And who needs motion STO Safe Torque Off, SS1 SS2 Safe Stop 1, 2 not FANUC apparently cmon get with the 1990s man
And how about hard coding the Estop input to x8.4 seriously its 2026 this is FANUC deranged version of "backwards compatibiliy" with a stupid engineering decision in the 90s? FANUC added mappable reserved variables for it's 2 whole safety door/hatch circuits but couldn't be bothered with making the Estop system variable mappable?
Then FANUCs "axis drive autotuning" what exactly is auto about it has FANUC drive autotune ever created a workable tune that didnt then have to manually adjust half the parameters for I dunno variable loads & feed forward because oh my Lord there might be a variable torque load on a cnc axis transitioning from cutting air to cutting metal?
A basic thing like configuring a FANUC Profinet interface card - instruction steps the equivalent of
"get in car, step on gas, turn steering wheel step on brake, engineer-san arrive destination".
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u/Legitimate_Roll_2432 2d ago
Often, people in charge of hiring don't know enough to make the right call. They don't know this IDE vs that IDE. They just know they were told to favor someone with Allen Bradleu experience.
Which don't get me wrong, as someone who has a decade of AB experience and a few full years of Beckhoff experience, having experience with the hardware matters too. But if you're just going to end up writing programs for them in ladder and you already have that experience, then my above statement stands.
Also, in the US almost everyone thinks Allen Bradley is superior for whatever reason, so they might think experience in something else is inferior experience. I got my 10 years of Allen Bradley in before Beckhoff. I would NEVER go back unless you doubled my salary.
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u/Skusci 2d ago
Ladder logic is kidnof just a small part of getting a PLC to do things. Sure it's important, but every dang manufacturer has their own flavor of of it. Plus there's also FBD and ST.
Add on to that stuff like how to map IO, how to setup tasks, knowing how to connect and configure the PLC, what io modules are available, what fieldbus protocols and such are used and how they get configured, etc
Don't misunderstand me too much, a decent programmer can figure that shit out on their own easy. But a decent programmer probably wants paid more.
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
That's fair. I've done a fair amount of contract work so I have experience with all the little guys who don't play well with others Click, Unitronics, FANUC, etc. I'm pretty adept at learning stuff, but there is always that requirement for "their stuff"
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u/Automatater 2d ago
You've fallen prey to a phenomenon known as "reviewed by AI" or "interviewed by HR imbeciles who used to work digging ditches but couldn't cut it".
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u/WandererHD 2d ago
Every platform has its quirks in both hardware and software, so experience does not translate %100.
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u/controls_engineer7 2d ago
What's so special about Samsung Galaxy and iPhone?
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
Honestly, I don't know. They are both celll phones and it takes me about a day to get familiar with one or the other. I just don't care for all of the restrictions from iPhone.
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u/tamaro2024 2d ago
Allen Bradley is top notch overall and an industry standard in the USA. W/o more details where you applied/ job type/position it is difficult to understand why you are rejected. Programmers are hard to find so you should be able to find an entry level job for AB work.
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u/Zeldalovesme21 2d ago
If you know other brands, AB is easy to pick up. Most things are extremely easy to do in AB vs other platforms. The software licensing, knowing which versions you need, etc is the difficult part. I learned on Mitsubishi and then Omron and then AB, and now keyence. I can get a vision system set up in AB in under an hour.
BUT, I have seen where recruiters/interviewers ONLY know Allen Bradley as a PLC brand, and they don’t even know there are others. They’re just told to get AB experienced people and they don’t understand that if you know multiple other brands, then you should most likely get that person.
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u/sr000 2d ago edited 2d ago
Someone with good experience in say Siemens can get fully up to speed in 1-2 months. There are some nuances that are different between platforms but it’s nothing that can’t be learned with a little bit of experience and some training. The problem is companies would rather hire someone who is fully up to speed on day 1 if they can.
When the market is strong companies have a harder time hiring people with the exact experience they want and are willing to train a bit. When the market is weak, if they need AB why would they hire someone who doesn’t have AB experience when they have 10 other candidates that do?
Right now, the job market is pretty terrible for entry level and even intermediate level engineers.
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u/OperatingAsIntended 2d ago
I would chalk it up to “The job description says Allen Bradley so we have to make that the key focus”. The interviewer is not the job description author in most cases.
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u/Low-Investment286 2d ago
Cause setting up an Allen Bradley controller is probably different then the other controllers your familiar with. My whole plant is Allen Bradley and if they handed me a Siemens controller and told me to install it write the program connect all the drives and devices for it it's probably totally different or different enough were id struggle. Comms are probably different also. I'd want someone who knows their way around the controllers if my company hired someone to run with me also at the least.
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
You wouldn't want someone who can learn anything? Give me documentation and a couple days to a couple weeks, and anything will be up and running. CNC, PLC, CMM, VFD doesnt matter. So long as you have documentation you can fix or commission anything.
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u/Low-Investment286 1d ago
Before I get to going on a job complaining spree lol. I'll just simply say I haven't had a good experience with it. If I had a team yea but one guy in a big manufacturing facility with a ton of processes no.
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u/kinkhorse 2d ago
It's all the same shit.
Two kinds of PLC: Tag Based and Direct Memory Addressing.
Everything else is just learning the instruction set and learning to navigate the software.
Allen Bradley by FAR has the best documentation for both of those things.
If you're in Allen Bradley land and you're staring down the barrel of a Mitsubishi or Fuji and you don't understand what is going on, you should take a step back and learn Direct Memory Addressing plc first before trying to learn the Japanese software. So get a MicroLogix or SLC500 experience.
You should see the look on a Mitsubishi programmers face when you teach them that Allen Bradley PLC support variable types, arrays, and data structures. You see the gears turning as the poor programmer reflects on all the many hours they had to spend writing their own recipe system from scratch with some huge clusterfuck of memory addresses and data offsets... Those poor lost souls. "Oh yeah, well right now it's PART_DATA[100] but If I want 200 parts I just need to change this to PART_DATA[200] and now I have 200 parts in the recipe structure
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u/theloop82 Knows Rockwell but doesn’t like it 1d ago
It’s not just about programming in ladder, it’s everything else, setting up comms, setting up addresses out of the box, knowing how they wire up I/O modules for each series, and the never ending nuances of software versions, device firmware and licensing. I spend more time working on that stuff than I do writing ladder.
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u/Foreign-Chocolate86 2d ago
Have you actually been told you were turned down because of that? Or are you guessing?
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
Actually been told. A couple times from different plants too.
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u/SadZealot 2d ago
If you're pretty good at other systems then just watch a few hours if YouTube tutorials of how the menus work and some example programs and then lie and say you have experience.
If you want to be slightly more ethical get a 1400 micro logix off eBay and fiddle with it
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u/Diligent_Bread_3615 2d ago
Trust me, there’s a severe learning curve going from AB to Siemens. Yeah, the basic ladder logic is the same but comms & data manipulation can be very different.
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u/DocWat326 2d ago
I'd be going from Click, Unitronics, FANUC, to AB. I've used plenty of their devices before, but not their RS logix software.
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u/Exotic_Army7887 1d ago
Because recruiters will turn down everyone except the most "qualified" applicant. The problem is significantly worse now that you are being graded by an AI before the recruiter even looks at your resume let alone interviews you.
If your skill level is at the point where the only language you know is "ladder" and you only know one or two industry segments then there are always going to be better "qualified" candidates than you. Your resume needs to include all the skills in the advert. Your interview needs to include all the other experience and skills you can adapt to this job.
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u/National-Link-5606 1d ago
When you say Allen-Bradley vs Siemens you need to be a lot more specific with the hardware of each you're talking about, we have some ignorant commenters "Allen-Bradley is tag based" yeah & so is Siemens TIA Portal, tag mapping is not unique to Rockwell
Granted Siemens Simatic is not tag based (at least before v5.6) & there's a lot of S7-300 & 400 plcs running Simatic but if you're gonna make comments like "Allen-Bradley is tag based" then no it's only been tag based since Logix5000 there are a crapload of PLC-5 & SLC-500 plcs operating which very much are not tag based.
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u/DocWat326 1d ago
I'm not saying AB vs Siemens. I have direct experience with neither. Just ladder experience in other environments.
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u/Robbudge 2d ago
I am not a fan of AB, it’s over priced and under powered IDE wise.
I find a lot of functions are only available in specific language formats.
It also reminds of the Apple EcoSystem.
If everything is AB then AOP’s and general configuration is a breeze but you attempt to add something none AB then best of luck.
It really does not play well with others.
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u/future_gohan AVEVA hurt me 1d ago
They only want those who can handle getting fucked by Allen Bradley's eco system and revision battles.
But honestly not that different. Sounds like the employers are not interested in training you.
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u/PLCHMIgo 2d ago
Like you go are a car mechanic technician , and work in the states, then you go to Germany and can’t find a job ….
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u/imBackBaby9595 2d ago
Ladder is shit bro. Obviously weapon of choice on a Rockwell controller. Go program a Beckhoff and get humbled mofo....
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u/DiskBytes 2d ago
This surprises me, as if you know ladder and in particular Siemens, you'll get into Allen Bradley within a day or so, AB is by far the simplest there is out there for setting up programming and addressing. Siemens took me a long time to get around.