The knowledge must be special or advanced in relation to the petitioning company's own products, processes, equipment or procedures rather than in relation to the industry generally. Long service and general competence do not meet it. The transferee also needs one continuous year of qualifying employment abroad within the three years before filing.
The comparison is with a competent new hire, not with the public
A useful way to test a draft petition is to ask what a skilled person recruited from a competitor would still have to be taught, and how long that teaching would take. If the answer is a fortnight of orientation, the knowledge is the industry's. If the answer is many months because the employer's method is genuinely its own and is not published anywhere, the claim has substance.
Hypothetical example: a technician at a Sainte-Cécile-de-Milton equipment firm calibrates dosing heads using a procedure the company developed after a series of failures at one of its own installations, and which it has never published. A rival's technician would calibrate to the manufacturer's standard sequence and would produce different results on this equipment. That gap, described precisely and supported by the internal record of how the procedure came about, is what the classification is looking for.
Twelve years of service, standing alone, describes loyalty rather than specialized knowledge.