Respected Sir/Mam,
I am a fresher in automation field....I have joined a company as trainee engineer and i am currently undergoing trainning in electrical drawing(epaln)...I want to become a complete automation engineer...pls guide me how to achieve my goal and what are the diff stages included in it....

Try to gain a complete understanding of cause and effect for any system with which you are involved. Try to broaden your experience of different subjects, electrical, mechanical, fluids and gases. These will help give you insights to what will be the result of any action which you might apply to any system. Above all, learn the basics thoroughly. If you know the first principles of anything, you can generally work things out to achieve your aim. Good Luck!

Thank you sir.

TRY TO GET THE BOOK ''LESSONS FOR INSTRUMENTATION" IN ONLINE. AS IT CONTAINS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FIELD INSTRUMENTS THAT ARE TO BE MONITORED BY THE PLCs. AS Mr JAMES SAID, KNOW HOW THIGN WORK IS THE KEY TO MAKING THEM WORK THE WAY YOU WANT THEM TO WORK.

Thank You Sir.

knowledge of process is ok but a sure short cut to application expertise is get hold of field instrument manual and read it as if you are going to take exam on it . next ,grab opportunity to work and try connection as per the manual .
however the above opportunity in academic pursuit will be scarce and best bet is to take up job working under an experienced mentor.

Do try learning some industrial networking and related protocols. Since Automation now involves more IT it is good to know a bit of programming in say VB C# .net etc since SCADA HMI etc are mostly based on these languages. Of course PLC programming is a must- ladder, SFC, FBD, etc. Most manufacturers like Siemens ABB Allen-Bradley and others have similar systems and technology. Get to know about VFDs and other Switchgear too. It would prove useful. AutoCAD and Eplan too.

Too much emphasis is put on learning the tools, which is kind of like a best selling author learning to use a word processor. Anyone can learn to use the tools. What is important is what you can do with them.

There are two components that make a good automation engineer. The first is being good at mathematics. If you don't have that then you should look elsewhere for a career. Second is the ability to visualize a process in your mind and convert that process to mathematical equations so that you can make a computer model it and then control it.

Other things that you need to learn is to make your system resilient. It must be able to handle failures and make the process safe, but also it must be able to recover from then.

Once you have learned these, the tools are just tools. Pick the tools that you need and learn them.

I agree with all the advices and suggestions above. Basically one can be imaginative with high levels aptitude to understand the manual processes and reproduce them with automati on. Effectively one has to be ready to be engineer encompassing all the engineering faculties- be it mechnaical/ chemical/ electrical or what ever apart from being Electronics & instrumentation engineer. My best wishes are with you.