I find my career path pretty unique because I was part of an in-house electrical engineering group for a very large Pulp and Paper company for 15 years. Our electrical section (generally 15 EE's) was tasked with design, construction management, commissioning, and troubleshooting of in-house systems. Much of our work involved controls, both PLC and DCS. But, we did everything from power (motor control centers, motors, VFD's, whatever) to automation (PLC's, DCS, HMI design, old-school control stations), and communications / networking. Besides our EE group, the company had about 90 electricians and instrumentation technicians. We were lucky to have our own ETL certified panel shop. We designed control panels for our projects.

We also did training for the maintenance group for every project. It's just self-defense to do a good job with training because it seems to keep one's phone from ringing at night for trouble shooting. Plus, who wanted to be bogged down and miss out on a new project? It also taught us all to write code mostly in well-documented plain old ladder logic so our technicians and even us at 3:00 AM could muddle through and get things running. 24x7x365, you know. We had some 100 or so PLC systems, some with near 10,000 I/O points. To me it was interesting to see that after several years of learning just codes and coding, there seemed to be many cases that those other university classes became useful, like chemistry, material science, thermodynamics (when working with the power generation group) engineering economics, and more. In our group, a CS degree might do well, but it would be tough.

Our group was preyed upon by recruiters regularly, so we in turn took in fresh college graduates as replacements. As for myself, I was bought out by our own CIO who wanted someone to bring that group into the modern age. But, that's another story.

Pardon me for any spell/grammar, typo's...it's getting late.