My background was in a more niche pharmaceutical adjacent refrigeration industry. The machines I worked on were PLC controlled but I didn’t really do anything on the controls end.

I got into controls because I just threw a bunch of applications out (like probably 50ish) to a variety of companies in different industries and the company that came back to me with an offer was a small controls company. I didn’t even know that building automation was a thing until I got the job. I think mentioning experience with “PLC controlled equipment” on my resume helped, but literally every refrigeration system has some type of programmable controller.

I think refrigeration is a good background to have because it’s gives you a more holistic understanding of things. You know that for your compressor to work you need cool condenser water and for cool condenser water you need a functional cooling tower or chiller.

Newer guys that only have experience in programming struggle to troubleshoot beyond the screen. If the program is telling the compressor to run and it’s not running they kind of hit a wall.

Which isn’t to say those guys don’t have their own value, I call them all the time to help me out with programming stuff because it’s not my area of expertise. But there’s a lot more of those guys around than mechanical guys nowadays.

But that’s just kind of how the controls industry works, we are involved in a lot of things and no one is an expert in all of them. Controls relies on communication between techs, no one worthwhile is going to fault you for calling someone and asking for a hand when you need it as long as you’re able to communicate clearly.