As I’m sure you may know, the salary that you can expect will be based on several factors
including your years of experience, proficiency in the specific platform such as Siemens,
Allen Bradley, or Modicon, and so on.
Other factors may include your ability to draft/design electrical panel drawings,
programming of Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs),
or Plant Control Systems such as Wonderware, IFix or WinCC,
schooling certificates or degrees and others.
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Trying to define a salary expectation is difficult because of the many factors
but as a baseline, I have seen wages as low as $12 dollars (USD) an hour
for an entry level PLC Programmer, meaning previous training but no actual on the job experience.
Of course, that entry-level wage changes if you have some electrical drafting or designing skills.
Again, the salary will change with HMI programming knowledge.
If you have many years of experience and a wide variety of platforms, etc.,
you could expect as much as $55 dollars (USD) as your hourly wage.
As you can see, there are many factors that go into the base of a salary consideration.
To give you an example I will tell you about some of the experiences I have previously seen.
In the early 2000’s, a contract position at Company A was acquired by a colleague.
At that time, the candidate had several years of experience in both PLC and HMI programming.
That employee was paid about $5 more an hour than the average wage of about $30 dollars (USD) an hour.
The reason was because, as a contract employee,
there are no benefits such as time off or health care,
so a larger hourly wage is required in order to compensate for benefits and attract candidates.
After about 1 ½ years, the employee left Company A
and decided to further his education while earning a Bachelors Degree.
Many years later, that employee was contacted again,
by Company A, for a position that they had open.
This time, the job was a direct employment position with benefits.
The direct position salary ended up being about $12,000 a year LESS
than his previous contract position.
Reason being, direct hire positions have benefits packages which the companies equate to salary.
So if they paid part of his insurance at $7,000 a year
and he got a couple of weeks' vacation, then that would come to some amount
be considered total compensation when added to the salary.
You may have caught on that the employee had previously worked for this company
and they required no degree at that time
but when they wanted the employee to come on as a direct hire,
the qualifications for that position changed.
As you can see from those experiences, things vary greatly based on many, many factors.
What I can tell you is you can expect anything from $25,000 to as high az $115,000 annual salary.
Do not forget that you are the best advocate for negotiating your wage.
Always do your homework about the company, the requirements,
expectations, benefits, etc., then factor in your experience with that data.
At that point, you can make an educated guess
on what salary expectations you can have for your next position.
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