The knowledge has to be of the employer’s own product, process or procedures, or advanced knowledge of how that organization does things. General competence in anaerobic digestion, however deep, belongs to the industry rather than to the company, and industry expertise does not support this classification.
Ask what could only have been learned here
The useful exercise is a subtraction. Hypothetical example: take everything Damien knows, remove what is taught in any engineering programme, remove what any experienced operator picks up in the field, remove what equipment vendors publish in their manuals, and look at what remains. If what remains is a proprietary recipe library, control parameters derived from this firm’s own installed base and a fault-diagnosis sequence developed in-house, there is something to describe.
If what remains is thin, the honest conclusion is that the role is not specialized and a different route should be examined. Two further requirements sit alongside it and are sometimes forgotten in the argument about knowledge. The employment abroad must have lasted one continuous year within the three preceding the petition, and the American entity must be a genuine parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate that is actually doing business.
A strong knowledge argument does not rescue a weak corporate relationship.