I'm an apprentice electrician who got an associates degree in automation & industrial electric studies. I've been assigned to process control to learn our PLC systems and how to tweak and resolve issues. The fun part is 90% of our PLCs are PLC5 with a scant few RS500 & RS5000 systems in place. Being the plant is 40 years old it's time to migrate to RS5000 but we've already encountered some of the trip ups that occur in migrating the code from 5 to 5000. I've encountered the main difference in finding bits. For example I've been writing code in 5 to get a hang of the TOF bits and using .ACC, EN and DN bits. I had a call the other day to help force a bit on in our newly migrated 5000 program and learned there are no data tables like I've learned on but instead tags for the program. I understand the drilling down to the word level to the specific bit but find that's a very tedious process to change a bit's status.
I learned to program in school on Siemens S7 and the 5, 500 and 5000 programs, while similar are another ball of wax completely. My concern moving forward is twofold- am I wasting my time learning PLC5 and how to troubleshoot it when everything is moving to 5000 and should I spend more time learning the 5000 idiosyncrasies so I have that skill set for future jobs? I feel like I'm becoming proficient in a useless medium and lagging behind the curve of what is being used in industry today.