PLC Training for Electricians — What Transfers

You've wired more DOL starters than you can count. Contactor, overload, start button, stop button, retaining contact across the start. You could do it with the drawing upside down. What you haven't done is open the program that decides when that contactor pulls in, and on more and more sites the program is exactly where the decision lives. The hard-wired starter you learned for your trade test is becoming the backup plan; the PLC output is the real control. This page is for the electrician who wants to cross that line: what your trade already covers, what it doesn't, and the shortest practical route through the gap.

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What you already know that transfers

More than you think, and more than any other trade walking into PLC work.

The DOL starter you've wired is the first rung you'll write. A start-stop circuit with a retaining contact is, line for line, the seal-in rung that every PLC course on earth opens with. Start button in series with a stop button, output coil, a contact off that coil wrapped back around the start. You have built that circuit with copper. Now you'll build it with an examine-on instruction instead of a physical auxiliary contact, and the behaviour is identical. Electricians get through the first week of ladder logic faster than anyone else because ladder notation was lifted from the relay control schematics your trade still uses — the symbols for contacts and coils on your drawings and the instructions on a PLC rung are close cousins. That advantage is real, and it's yours. Use it.

Schematic reading transfers whole. You already trace a circuit from supply through devices to the load, you already follow wire numbers across pages, and you already know that the drawing is the truth and the panel is the claim. Reading a ladder program is the same discipline pointed at a screen. The electricians who struggle with PLCs are almost never struggling with the logic — they're struggling with the software around it.

Your NO/NC instinct is the hard part of contacts, already done. You know why a stop button is normally closed. You know what fail-safe means at the terminal level: lose the wire, lose the circuit, machine stops. That instinct maps directly onto examine-on and examine-off instructions, and it's the single concept that trips up people who come to PLCs from a software background. They have to learn why the stop contact in the program is examined-on when the physical button is NC. You already know — you wired it that way on purpose.

Fault-finding on the field side. Half of PLC troubleshooting is deciding whether the problem is the field device, the cable, the termination, or the program. You can already do three of the four. When the input LED on the card doesn't come on, you know where to put your meter. The greenest part of your toolkit is only the fourth quarter of the job.

What's missing

Be honest about the gap, because it's specific and it's learnable.

The software workflow. Creating a project, configuring the CPU, writing the program, downloading it, going online to watch it run. None of this exists in your trade. It isn't hard, but it's unfamiliar in the way a new test instrument is unfamiliar — you need hours on it, not talent. This is most of what the first month of practice actually builds.

Addressing and tags. On a panel, a wire has a number and lands on a terminal. In a PLC, an input has an address (%I0.3, or a named tag like Motor_Start_PB) and the program refers to the address, not the wire. Getting comfortable with the idea that the program manipulates memory, and the memory maps to terminals, takes a couple of weeks of it feeling slightly abstract. Then it clicks and you never think about it again.

The scan cycle. A relay circuit is parallel physics: every contact acts at once, electrically. A PLC reads its inputs, sweeps the program top to bottom, then writes its outputs — thousands of times a second, but in order. Most of the genuinely new theory in your transition lives in that one fact. Rung order matters. An output written twice ends up with the last value. A change mid-scan isn't seen until the next input read. Our scan cycle explainer covers it properly, and you should read it before the timers section because almost every "the program is doing something weird" moment a beginner electrician hits is a scan-cycle misunderstanding.

Timers and counters as instructions. You know what an off-delay timer does because you've mounted pneumatic and electronic ones on DIN rail. The PLC versions behave the same way, but the preset, the accumulated value, and what happens when the rung goes false are all visible in memory now, and the program logic can read them mid-count. That's new capability, not just new packaging.

The path

Done in order, on the simulator, around a working week. Figure on five to eight hours a week for the first two months.

1. Ladder logic basics — one evening. You'll move fast through this because of the relay-schematic head start, but don't skip it; the addressing material is the part you don't have.
2. Start-stop seal-in — the graded exercise version of the circuit you've wired a hundred times. The point isn't the logic, it's doing the full software loop: write, download, test, watch it run.
3. Jog vs latch motor control — the first exercise where the program does something a hard-wired circuit needs extra relays for. Jog while held, latch when started. This is where most electricians report the "oh, I see why plants use these" moment.
4. Star-delta starter — you've wired the six-wire version with a timer block on the rail. Now write the transition logic yourself, including the interlock that stops the star and delta contactors pulling in together. If your program allows both coils on at once, the grader fails you, exactly as the smoke would on a real panel.
5. Timers and counters with the TON/TOF/TP reference open beside it. Then on-delay motor staging to apply it — staggered starts are bread-and-butter plant work and a question that comes up in nearly every controls interview.
6. PLC troubleshooting — this is where your fault-finding instinct gets pointed at the program side, and it's the skill that makes an electrician with PLC knowledge immediately useful on shift rather than eventually useful.

Keep the contacts and coils reference bookmarked through all of it. It's the page you'll come back to when an examine-off instruction does the opposite of what you expected at 21:00 on a Tuesday.

The SA qualification context

If you came up through N2/N3 and a trade test, here's where PLC skills sit in that world: nowhere official, and that's worth understanding before you spend money. The electrician trade test doesn't examine PLC programming. There's no registered stand-alone "PLC programmer" qualification on the NQF — we wrote up the whole certification landscape at PLC certification in South Africa, and the short version is that employers test what you can do at a laptop, not what's framed on your wall.

What PLC skills actually change is your rate and your work. Installation and reticulation work is priced against every other wireman in the province. An electrician who can also open a program, find the rung that's holding an output off, and explain why — that person is priced against a much shorter list. The move out of installation work and into controls is a well-worn path with real numbers attached, and we've written it up properly twice: the 18–24 month path from electrician to control engineer covers the full route including credentials and salary bands, and upskilling from the electrical trade digs into exactly which Red Seal skills carry forward and what the wage curve looks like. This page gets you started; those two pages are the map for the whole journey.

One opinion, since you're here: the worst thing an electrician can do with this ambition is book an expensive classroom course first. You'll spend four days watching an instructor drive the software, then go home to no software. Build fluency cheaply first, then spend classroom money — if you still need to — on the vendor-specific things a portfolio can't show.

What it costs

The free tier gives you the unlimited sandbox and the first six lessons, which covers everything through the seal-in exercise above. Basic at $12 a month (around R220) opens the full curriculum and the wiring track. And the wiring track is worth a look even for a qualified electrician, because it covers the sensor-wiring patterns (PNP versus NPN, sourcing versus sinking) that sit between your trade and instrument work. Pro at $29 a month adds sensor school, cert packs, and the portfolio export. Full tier detail is on the pricing page, and if you're weighing this against classroom options, the rand-for-rand comparison is at PLC course prices in South Africa.

Common questions

I'm not a computer person. Is that a problem?

If you can navigate a smartphone and you've filled in a job card on a tablet, you have the computer skills this needs. The simulator runs in a browser — nothing to install, no licence dongles, no IT department. The electricians who say "I'm not a computer person" are usually fluent within three weeks, because the logic was never the issue; only the mouse-and-menus layer was, and that layer is shallow.

Can I do this while working full-time on the tools?

Yes, and most people in your position do. The browser-based format means a lesson fits into an evening without setting up hardware, and progress saves automatically so a fifteen-minute session isn't wasted. The realistic pace alongside full-time work is one to two lessons a week plus exercise time. The career pages linked above lay out an 18–24 month timeline to a controls role at that pace; the first six months of it look exactly like the path on this page.

Which brand should I learn first — Siemens or Allen-Bradley?

Look at the panels on the sites you already work. In SA, petrochem and water lean Siemens; food, beverage and packaging lean Allen-Bradley. The simulator teaches IEC 61131-3 ladder logic — the international standard both brands implement — so the patterns you build here transfer to either. Pick the brand your target sector runs when you get to vendor-specific tools, not before.

Does my wireman's licence or trade test count for anything in controls?

It counts for plenty with employers — a controls technician who's trade-tested is trusted around live panels in a way a pure programmer never is — but it doesn't exempt you from proving the software side. Plan to show working programs at an interview. The trade papers get you taken seriously; the portfolio gets you hired.

Start with the free tier →

What we don't claim

This site and the simulator behind it are not SAQA-registered, not MerSETA-accredited, and not an NQF-registered qualification provider. Completing our curriculum doesn't make you an electrician — you already did the hard part of that — and it doesn't issue anything with standing on the national framework. What it does is build demonstrable PLC fluency, with graded exercises and an exportable record on the Pro tier, which is what controls hiring in this country actually screens for. The trade-to-controls outcomes described here are patterns we observe among working electricians, not guarantees; your timeline depends on your sector, your hours, and how much of the path above you actually finish.