Controls tech: What Is A Controls Technician

What Is A Controls Technician

The primary job of a controls technician is to monitor the control systems of automated equipment. Control technicians use specific software to verify that the controls are within set parameters. When it exceeds or falls below parameters, they troubleshoot to minimize interruptions to production. This personnel works in manufacturing, sanitation, and nuclear energy industries. He/She analyzes the procedures for equipment installation and recommends solutions to improve installation schedules and processes. He/She works with vendors to ensure prompt and accurate delivery of materials. Additionally, he/she performs duties as assigned by management.

Employers seek candidates with an associate’s degree in automation technology or electrical engineering. They may provide on-the-job training. Candidates must be good communicators and detail-oriented. You must be able to interpret electrical and mechanical drawings. You must be physically fit. Control technicians earn an average salary of $61,042 per year. It falls between $43,000 and $86,000.

What Does a Controls Technician Do

There are certain skills that many controls technicians have in order to accomplish their responsibilities. By taking a look through resumes, we were able to narrow down the most common skills for a person in this position. We discovered that a lot of resumes listed dexterity, detail oriented and mechanical skills.

Learn more about what a Controls Technician does

How To Become a Controls Technician

If you’re interested in becoming a controls technician, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We’ve determined that 36.0% of controls technicians have a bachelor’s degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 3.7% of controls technicians have master’s degrees. Even though some controls technicians have a college degree, it’s possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.

Learn More About How To Become a Controls Technician

Controls Technician Job Description

A controls technician is a key part of any factory. They design, build, and evaluate manufacturing machinery and systems, as well as fix and maintain them, and often take steps to further upgrade their processes.

Learn more about Controls Technician Job Description

Top Controls Technician Jobs Near You

Controls Technician Career Paths

As you move along in your career, you may start taking on more responsibilities or notice that you’ve taken on a leadership role. Using our career map, a controls technician can determine their career goals through the career progression. For example, they could start out with a role such as electrician, progress to a title such as foreman and then eventually end up with the title manager, project management.

Controls Technician

ElectricianForemanProject Manager

Manager, Project Management

9 Years

ElectricianField Service TechnicianEngineer

Engineering Manager

10 Years

ElectricianMaintenance SupervisorMaintenance Manager

Facilities Maintenance Manager

10 Years

Field Service TechnicianSupervisorWarehouse Manager

Material Manager

9 Years

Field Service TechnicianEngineerProcess Engineer

Process Engineering Manager

9 Years

Controls EngineerProject ManagerAssistant Director

Environmental Services Director

9 Years

Show More

Top Careers Before Controls Technician

Maintenance Technician(178,450 Jobs)

15. 5 %

Electrician(17,245 Jobs)

12.3 %

Technician(596,842 Jobs)

Top Careers After Controls Technician

Maintenance Technician(178,450 Jobs)

16.3 %

Technician(596,842 Jobs)

Field Service Technician(167,298 Jobs)

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Controls Technicians in America make an average salary of $53,345 per year or $26 per hour. The top 10 percent makes over $75,000 per year, while the bottom 10 percent under $37,000 per year.

Average Controls Technician Salary

$53,345 Yearly

$25.65 hourly

$37,00010%

$53,000Median

$75,00090%

See More Salary Information

What Am I Worth?

Roles and Types of Controls Technician

The role of a controls technician includes a wide range of responsibilities. These responsibilities can vary based on an individual’s specific job, company, or industry.Here are some general controls technician responsibilities:

• Provide leadership to direct and coordinate activities such as repairs, preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, alterations, improvements
• Improve bottling line efficiency through changes to automated controls utilize technical skills in troubleshooting, adjusting,
• Plans, develops, schedules and implements all in-plant electrical control installations, working closely with mechanical / electrical engineers

There are several types of controls technician, including:

Technician

Role:

To be a technician, you have to know your stuff. Some may refer to you as an expert in your field or maybe people will know you as skilled in an art or craft. Then again, you may just be needed to look after technical equipment.

Your workload as a technician will vary, depending on what you’re trained in. You may be needed to set up a new computer system or maybe you’ll need to fix an electricity problem. Either way, you’ll probably only need to work 40 hours a week.

The degree of education required for this job depends on what you’re specific skillset is. Some technicians only need a high school diploma, others may want to complete an associate’s program or earn a certificate to help their employment opportunities. There’s definitely something for everyone in the field of technicians.

• Average Salary: $38,045
• Degree: Bachelor’s Degree

Electronics Technician

Role:

Wherever there is electricity, you will find an electronic technician. In places where there is lighting, heating, computers, machinery, or public transport, sooner or later they show up.

Electronic technicians know everything about circuits, amplifiers, resistors, switches, and regulators. They design electronic devices and components, maintain electronic systems, and install electrical equipment.

Choosing to be an electronic technician might be the best decision of your life. Electricity is magic, there is never enough of it. The amount of electricity used in the U.S. alone today is 13 times the quantity needed in 1950, and this tendency is not about to reverse anytime soon.

The average hourly pay of an electric technician is $21.31. You can do the math. If not, you might want to look for another profession, keep browsing those job posts.

• Average Salary: $46,660
• Degree: Associate Degree

Engineering Technician

Role:

Equipment, construction and design all have one thing in common. They all need to be inspected and tested by engineering technicians. Once you’ve done that, then it’s time to type up a report of what you analyzed.

Occassionally, you’ll be able to help draw up blueprints and plans for products and equipment. If you like coloring inside the lines, this job may be perfect for you. While you won’t be coloring inside any lines (probably), you will get to draw very straight lines which can be aesthetically pleasing.

Engineering technicians can usually get by with just a bachelor’s degree. That’s enough to appease the average employer.

• Average Salary: $60,273
• Degree: Bachelor’s Degree

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States With The Most Controls Technician Jobs

Mouse over a state to see the number of active controls technician jobs in each state. The darker areas on the map show where controls technicians earn the highest salaries across all 50 states.

Average Salary: Job Openings:

Number Of Controls Technician Jobs By State

Controls Technician Education

Controls Technician Majors

Electrical Engineering

21. 0 %

Electrical Engineering Technology

14.9 %

Business

13.0 %

Controls Technician Degrees

Associate

38.0 %

Bachelors

36.0 %

High School Diploma

12.8 %

Top Colleges for Controls Technicians

1. Michigan Technological University

Houghton, MI • Private

In-State Tuition

$15,646

Enrollment

5,736

2. Central Connecticut State University

New Britain, CT • Private

In-State Tuition

$10,616

Enrollment

9,325

3. Northwestern University

Evanston, IL • Private

In-State Tuition

$54,568

Enrollment

8,451

4. Purdue University

West Lafayette, IN • Private

In-State Tuition

$9,992

Enrollment

33,495

5. New Mexico State University

Las Cruces, NM • Private

In-State Tuition

$6,686

Enrollment

11,139

6. Wayne State University

Detroit, MI • Private

In-State Tuition

$13,097

Enrollment

17,114

7.

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Pomona, CA • Private

In-State Tuition

$7,353

Enrollment

24,841

8. Pennsylvania State University

University Park, PA • Private

In-State Tuition

$18,454

Enrollment

40,108

9. University of Houston

Houston, TX • Private

In-State Tuition

$8,913

Enrollment

37,291

10. California State University – Long Beach

Long Beach, CA • Private

In-State Tuition

$6,798

Enrollment

31,503

The skills section on your resume can be almost as important as the experience section, so you want it to be an accurate portrayal of what you can do. Luckily, we’ve found all of the skills you’ll need so even if you don’t have these skills yet, you know what you need to work on. Out of all the resumes we looked through, 8.2% of controls technicians listed plc on their resume, but soft skills such as dexterity and detail oriented are important as well.

• PLC, 8.2%
• Control Systems, 7.0%
• Preventative Maintenance, 6.6%
• HVAC, 5.2%
• HMI, 4.6%
• Other Skills, 68.4%

Controls Technician Demographics

Controls Technician Gender Distribution

Female

After extensive research and analysis, Zippia’s data science team found that:

• Among controls technicians, 16.0% of them are women, while 84.0% are men.

• The most common race/ethnicity among controls technicians is White, which makes up 60.6% of all controls technicians.

• The most common foreign language among controls technicians is Spanish at 52.0%.

Online Courses For Controls Technician That You May Like

Advertising Disclosure  The courses listed below are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the course, we may receive a commission.

Access Controls

Welcome to Access Controls! The Access Controls Course provides information pertaining to specify what users are permitted to do, the resources they are allowed to access, and what operations they are able to perform on a system. Access Controls help managers limit and monitor systems use at a user level or group membership. You will understand the different access control systems and how they should be implemented to protect the system and data using the different levels of confidentiality,…

View Details on Coursera

Access Control Concepts

Welcome to course 3 of 5 of this Specialization, Access Control Concepts. In Course 1, we introduced access control concepts. Now, we will take a more detailed look at the types of access control that every information security professional should be familiar with. We will discuss both physical and logical controls and how they are combined to strengthen the overall security of an organization. This is where we describe who gets access to what, why access is necessary, and how that access is…

View Details on Coursera

Control Systems: From Mathematical Modelling to PID Control

(737)

Learn the mathematics that will allow you to model and control any engineering system. Make machines do what you want!…

View Details on Udemy

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Becoming a Controls Technician FAQs

What Is A Plc Controls Technician?

A PLC controls technician designs, programs, repairs, and maintains programmable logic controller (PLC) systems used within manufacturing and service industries ranging from industrial packaging to commercial car washes and traffic lights.

Have more questions? See all answers to common architecture and engineering questions.

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Updated February 6, 2023

Technical Controls – Glossary | CSRC

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Technical Controls

Definition(s):

  The security controls (i. e., safeguards or countermeasures) for an information system that are primarily implemented and executed by the information system through mechanisms contained in the hardware, software, or firmware components of the system.
Source(s):


FIPS 200

under TECHNICAL CONTROLS


NIST SP 800-137

from
FIPS 200

NIST SP 800-18 Rev. 1



NIST SP 800-82 Rev. 2

  Security controls (i.e., safeguards or countermeasures) for an information system that are primarily implemented and executed by the information system through mechanisms contained in the hardware, software, or firmware components of the system.
Source(s):


NIST SP 800-30 Rev. 1

from
FIPS 200

NIST SP 800-39

from
FIPS 200

  hardware and software controls used to provide automated protectionto the IT system or applications. Technical controls operate within the technical system and applications.
Source(s):


NIST SP 800-16

Management technology – Formation and development of management

Technology




management

Management technology is the techniques, methods and order (sequence, regulations) for the implementation of the management process as a whole and its constituent functions. In the process of any technology, the object of labor is transformed into a product of labor.

The subject of management as a system of relations with subordinates and clientele is manifested in the general subject of managerial work – information that ensures the adoption of managerial decisions. In relation to the subject of labor, management technology is a set and sequence of ways to work with information in the implementation of management functions.

The management process, like the production process, is continuous, but for the purpose of studying it, the stages associated with the formation and adoption of managerial decisions are distinguished: preparation and decision-making, management of the execution of decisions, control.

For the subject of management, information is not only the subject of labor, but at the same time both the means (knowledge, experience) and the product of labor (management decision).

Let us briefly consider the triune (subject, means and product of labor) essence of managerial work. Information is the most important concept, which is regarded as a certain quality inherent in all material systems and reflecting the diversity of their properties or the degree of orderliness of these properties. Therefore, the science of information is directly related to all types of human activity and phenomena of any physical nature. Information is usually defined as an abstract category that is invariant to its material-energy carrier (signal), but manifests itself in a material-energy form. This means that any information can be transmitted by various signals, but the information is devoid of independent existence, i.e. it is generated, transmitted and obtained materially – energetically. Material carriers of information can be light, sound, paper, magnetic tape and other physical bodies. Information exists if there are three elements: a source (object), a signal, and a receiver (receiver).

Sources of information and the messages they create are divided into discrete and continuous. Discrete messages are composed of a countable, or finite, set of elements created by the source sequentially in time. The set of elements is called the source alphabet, and the elements are called letters, which can be any characters. Continuous messages are reflected by some physical quantity that changes in a given time interval. The set of values ​​from the discontinuous message form a continuum – the set of real numbers.

The carrier of a message is a signal, a physical process whose parameters carry information. A more general definition: a signal is a display of a message, a material carrier of information and a means of transferring information in space and time. A message can be viewed as a change in a physical state that is different from other physical states in the control chain, or a transformation of One message into another of the same association, i. e. arising in one part of the management.

Depending on what kind of transformation the messages have undergone and how significant they are for the recipient, non-trivial and trivial information and various types of information transformation are distinguished: informing, misinforming, pseudo-informing, etc.

The formation of a signal consists in changing the state of an object, the converse statement is unfair: not every change in the state of an object is a signal. An impact on an object and a change in its state will lead to the formation of a signal only if there is a set of rules for the formation of a signal, which is usually called a code. The code can be created artificially, or it can exist in a natural state, reflecting a change in the object that creates the signal, which is commonly called interference. A randomly created object state will be perceived as an interference signal if the interference code is close to the code of the useful signal. The nature of interference is varied.

In economic systems, interference is associated with the distortion (intentional or accidental) of information recorded on information carriers (in documents, etc.). Improving the quality of information depends on the effectiveness of communication processes (forms of communication, methods of transmission and perception of information, etc.) and technology of managerial work. Management technology is largely determined by the content of the production of goods and the influence of the external environment.

Each product has its own life cycle determined by the market. In marketing, the following stages of the product life cycle are distinguished: launching on the market, growth in sales (profits), maturity of the product and saturation of the market, decline in sales and exit from the market. The development of a new product also takes time and the corresponding stages are allocated. Obviously, for the continuity of production, there must be a correspondence between the life cycles of products on the market and the development stages for their replacement with new products.

The cycles of development and production of various goods vary widely (from several months to ten or more years), but the length of the life cycle of goods is determined by other (market) factors. Therefore, the role of marketing is very important in determining the strategy for the release of new products, especially for expensive ones and those with a long development and production cycle.

Appropriate control technology must be developed to ensure the continuity of production and management In order to make the necessary decisions in a timely manner, firms must simultaneously effectively manage the production of salable goods and develop a strategy for the future. The functions of strategic management should be combined with the functions of operational management.

{SITELINK-S136}Types, forms and methods of organization of production{/SITELINK}

{SITELINK-S122}Technology for the development and implementation of SD{/SITELINK}

Management information technology

The purpose of management information technology is to meet the information needs of all employees of the company, without exception, dealing with decision making. It can be useful at any level of management.

In order to make decisions at the level of managerial control, information must be presented in an aggregated form so that data trends, causes of deviations and possible solutions can be seen.

At this stage, the following data processing tasks are solved:

• assessment of the planned state of the control object;
• assessment of deviations from the planned state;
• identifying the causes of deviations;
• analysis of possible solutions and actions.

This technology is oriented to work in the information management system environment and is used in case of worse structured tasks when compared with tasks solved using information technology for data processing.

Management ICs are ideally suited to meet the similar information needs of employees at different functional subsystems (departments) or levels of management in a firm. The information they provide contains information about the past, present and probable future of the company. This information takes the form of regular or ad hoc management reports.

Regular reports are generated according to a set schedule that determines when they are generated, such as a monthly analysis of a company’s sales.

Special reports are created at the request of managers or when something unplanned has happened in the company.

Both types of reports may take the form of summary, comparative, and extraordinary reports.

In summary reports, data is combined into separate groups, sorted and presented as subtotals and final totals for individual fields.

Comparative reports contain data obtained from various sources or classified according to various criteria and used for comparison purposes.

Emergency reports contain data of an exceptional (emergency) nature.

The use of reports to support management is particularly effective when implementing so-called variance management.

Deviation management assumes that the main content of the data received by the manager should be deviations of the state of the company’s economic activity from some established standards (for example, from its planned state).

Main components

The main components of the management information technology are shown in the figure.

Input information comes from operational level systems. The output information is formed in the form of management reports in a form convenient for decision-making.

Basic components of management information technology

The contents of the database with the help of appropriate software are converted into periodic and ad hoc reports that are received by specialists involved in decision-making in the organization.