PLC training in Munich in English: what a five-day TIA Portal course should give your team

If you need PLC training in Munich in English, the short answer is that options are thinner than you would expect for one of Europe's biggest engineering regions. Most classroom courses in Bavaria run in German. edWartens, the training arm of Wartens, runs a five-day PLC and SCADA course at its training centre in Oberhaching, just south of Munich, built on Siemens S7-1200, S7-1500, TIA Portal and WinCC (edWartens Germany). Its open courses run in German, and in-house courses for company groups can run fully in English on request (edWartens FAQ). For an English-speaking team, that in-house route is usually the answer.

This article explains who these courses suit, what a five-day course should cover if it is any good, and how to judge whether your people came back able to do more than before.

Who needs English-language PLC training in Munich

We see three groups. International engineers who moved to Bavaria and work in English-speaking teams at machine builders, automotive suppliers or research institutes. Mechanical or electrical engineers who now own controls tasks and need a structured start. And maintenance technicians at plants where the S7-300 fleet is being replaced, who must read and troubleshoot S7-1500 code they did not write.

The last group is growing. Siemens set the SIMATIC S7-300 to phase-out on 1 October 2025 and recommends S7-1500 or S7-1200 as successors (European Automation). Every migration hands a new platform to a maintenance team. Our guide to the S7-300 end of life explains why that training should start before cutover, not after.

The demand is not small. Bavaria's manufacturing establishments with 50 or more staff employed about 1.15 million people in August 2026, of them about 206,000 in machine building and about 103,000 in the city of Munich alone (Bavarian State Office for Statistics). A growing share of those teams are international.

What the edWartens PLC course in Oberhaching covers

The Professional module is five days of classroom training, from fundamentals to practical work, with a maximum of 15 participants. It uses real Siemens S7-1200 and S7-1500 hardware from the first day, programmed in TIA Portal, with WinCC for HMI and SCADA and Factory IO as a plant simulation. Participants get more than 12 hours of recorded preparation material to work through before they arrive, and a CPD-accredited certificate that employers can verify online (edWartens Germany).

That outline comes from the Professional module page. Day 5 is the one to ask about when you compare courses: a project that ties together sequence, HMI and communication shows whether people can apply what they learned.

What a good five-day PLC course should include

Whoever you train with, check the course against this list. Five days is enough to build real competence if the time goes on hands-on work and not on slides.

• Real hardware, not only a simulator. Simulators are excellent for logic, but wiring a sensor, forcing an output and watching a module diagnose a broken wire teaches things a screen cannot.
• Structured programming in the IEC 61131-3 languages. Ladder for maintenance-friendly logic, Structured Text for calculations, and function blocks with instance data. The standard is IEC 61131-3.
• A plant to control. A simulated conveyor, sorting station or filling line gives every exercise a purpose and lets people break things safely.
• HMI and alarms. Screens, tags, alarm classes and user management in WinCC. Operators judge a machine by its HMI.
• Diagnostics. Online monitoring, watch tables, cross-references, the diagnostic buffer and module status. This is what maintenance teams use at 3 a.m.
• Small groups. Fifteen or fewer, so that every participant gets time on a rack.

How to judge whether the training worked

Ask your engineer to do three things in the first fortnight back at work. Go online to a running S7-1500 and find why a sequence is stuck, using cross-references and the diagnostic buffer. Add a new alarm with text in both German and English. Write a small function block with its own instance data and reuse it twice. If they can do all three without help, the week paid for itself.

Classroom, online or in-house?

Self-paced video is a good way to learn the TIA Portal menus, and the preparation recordings exist for exactly that reason. It is a poor way to learn fault finding. The skills that matter on a German production line, such as reading a stuck sequence, judging whether a fault is in the code or in the field, and deciding when to call the machine builder, come from working on a rack with a trainer looking over your shoulder. That is why we keep the core course in a classroom with hardware on every desk.

In-house training works well when a whole maintenance shift must move to a new platform at once, or when you want exercises built around your own machines. It works less well for one or two people, who usually learn more in a mixed group where other participants bring different problems from other plants.

Funding and booking

Be aware of one limitation before you plan. edWartens states that it is not AZAV-certified, so its courses cannot be funded with a Bildungsgutschein from the employment agency. Most participants are funded by their employer (edWartens Germany). Current dates and prices are published on edwartens.de. In-house training at your site can also be arranged, priced by group size and scope.

Training alongside a migration or new machine project

Training lands best when it is tied to a real project. If Wartens is migrating your S7-300 code or delivering a new machine program, we can align the course content with the code your team will maintain, so they practise on the same structure, libraries and alarm concept. Read more about our engineering training and PLC engineering services.

Next step: tell us how many people you want to train, in which language, and which platform they will maintain. We will suggest a date in Oberhaching or an in-house option. Get in touch.