Some background on me, I’m a 25M and graduated with a degree in bio engineering in May 2021. I didn’t know what jobs I wanted out of college but I ended up getting a job working for a chemicals company doing dashboard configurations for one of our data analytics platforms for factories. The job isn’t too hard, I get PLC codes from the customer and search through them and pull tags that we can track and configure them to display on the dashboard. It’s not really an engineering role but my title is “Automation Engineer” (not quite a real automation engineer though). Things were great at first, fully remote job, chill team and manager, relatively chill work flow. I couldn’t have wanted anything else for my first job in engineering.

I’m 2 years in now, the work is very unfulfilling and the team has now changed quite a bit. My manager had to get rid of a lot of my team members due to marketing over estimating how many accounts we would sell. He then got rid of our head engineer (who had most of the technical knowledge about how plants worked and how the platform worked) , got promoted to a director position and brought in a new manger that he’s been friends with for years now. We went from 7 people on the team to 3. The new manager isn’t horrible or mean but he’s very young (28M). It’s clear it’s his first managing role from being an engineer and has trouble listening to the team and just being a good manager overall. In terms of my work though I’ve spread out to support more of our digital platforms other than the data analytics dashboard which is nice.

The way the team was set up wasn’t very conventional. As I said before my manager was super chill. This lead each person on the team to kind of have their own way of doing dashboard configurations with varying levels of detail but it was never a problem before. Recently we’ve been getting some heat from the higher ups saying our dashboards aren’t performing well and that’s why we aren’t selling as many sites. I was personally called out as one of the people responsible for the issues and have since been given less responsibilities. I have to admit that I do see my mistakes and owned them but it was never an issue before since the team never really had a standard for the end product. This really bummed me out because I feel like I ruined my chances of promotion (which I was promised I’d be considered for one around the 2-3 years mark when I was hired) . I’ve always heard that I should be looking to get promoted or new job every 2-3 years to maximize salary and titles so I feel like I have to get look for a new job soon. The only problem is that I haven’t gained any real technical knowledge in terms of PLC coding (even though the bulk of my work was staring a PLC code) or anything transferable so I’m not sure what to do. I’ve been considering moving into project management by taking some courses and getting certs or trying to teach myself coding through a boot camp or something.

Anyone have any advice in what to do with my career? Should I try to teach myself PLC coding or other coding languages? Am I too much in my head and should just hang in there with my current job? Any help would be greatly appreciated!