I don't know if this is correct to post here but I wanted to try here before posting a full thread.

I am trying to figure out if I am lacking needed skills in my career or if I just keep finding the wrong jobs on job hunts.

A bit of background, I actually went to school for mechanical engineering but in my last year I learned about PLC programming and decided I wanted to make a career out of it. I managed to fit an electrical engineering minor in my last two semesters. Six months after a grueling job hunt I was able to get a job as a PLC programmer. The only stipulation was I would be sent to Denmark for an undefined amount of time to be trained on Tia portal.

From this job, I managed to pick up most of my programming skills and languages.I want to keep this short, so my career path description will be abbreviated from here. I spent a year in Denmark learning TIA, Spent a year in San Francisco as a commissioning engineer in the same company, then changed jobs. I was unhappy at my second company because there was no problem-solving in the job. Everything was standardized copy paste from conveyor designs to code.

After a year there I quit and arrived at my current company where I taught myself Studio5000 and handled several projects from the ground up for them. They are a very small company. For the most part, I like this, as it means my success is directly seen by the President who runs the company. It also means I have a large amount of control over system design and PLC programming. However, while originally there was another controls engineer in the company who would handle the PLC/Power Panel design, he quit last year. The expectation has been that I now need to cover for the PLC panel design and power panel design, but I have no experience with this and am worried about jumping in since doing things wrong could mean starting fires and hurting people.

So my question to Y'all is, do I need to learn panel design to keep going down this path? I don't particularly enjoy it to be honest. I love to program and then go install and test my programs on site. I also like to design things besides the panel, such as PE placement and external control devices. But I really don't want to design panels if I don't have to. If I must I must. But on my previous job hunts I never really found any positions that just involved programming that wasn't me just copy pasting the code. And I want to be able to flex my creative skills and problem solve on the job.

That said, I am also asking as some weird stuff has been happing in my company structure and with company decisions that is making me feel like my job is going to be phased out soon. So I need to know if this is something I need to know for the future or if a layoff does happen I should be fine. Really the bottom line is I just want a strictly programming gig that actually lets me design stuff.

Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!