Crucial: FACTORS THAT AFFECT YOUR SALARY

Again this year, we asked respondents to tell us if they were currently seeking new job opportunities. Those who are actively seeking new opportunities made up 8.0% of respondents and had an average annual salary of $98,166—about $8,000 less than the average. Passive job seekers made up 36.9% of respondents, whose average salary was slightly less than average at $104,103. Those not seeking new opportunities (55.1%) were making an above average salary of $109,809.

There is a message here for employers. If you are paying less than the industry average, you could very likely lose your engineers. Based on data from industrial auto machines, a recruiting and contract staffing company based in Minnesota, there is a high demand for automation professionals, and high-quality candidates are hard to find. When companies do find good candidates, the candidates typically have multiple offers on the table. If your company employs high-quality professionals, pay them well, or you may lose them.

When we asked survey respondents if they were happy working in the automation profession, nearly 80% said “yes.” Only 2.2% said “no,” and 18.0% said “sometimes.” Those who said “yes” are making just slightly higher salaries than the average—$107,772. However, those who said “no” are making significantly less than the average—$90,875. Those who are happy “sometimes” came in just under the average at $104,356.

refer to: http://www.automation.com/factors-that-affect-your-salary-what-you-need-to-know

Demands for industrial automation

With the modern demands of industrial controls networking aplliance, it is imperative that we keep our clocks in synch across all of the devices in the network. Between the PLC, the SCADA system (PC or otherwise) and even the remote devices, many of these devices maintain real-time clocks (RTCs) on an Ethernet network for protocol support purposes. Therefore, we need to make certain that each of these devices synchs to one another lest the RTCs conflict, leading to packet losses and clashing time stamps. An extremely useful, and often implemented but forgotten, feature of modern intelligent devices is a protocol called Simple Network Time Protocol, or SNTP.

Prior to SNTP networking aplliance on modern industrial devices, engineers were forced to utilize some form of messaging to pass integers relating to the appropriate pieces of the time and date across their respective industrial protocols. Although this worked, it was tedious and very prone to errors, operator or otherwise. Furthermore, the precision was insufficient due to the nature of the messaging protocol, since milliseconds, or sometimes even seconds, could pass between the time the message was sent and when it was received. However, without another way, this was the only method left to controls engineers.

refer to: http://www.automation.com/leveraging-it-technology-for-industrial-controls-applications