Not on PLC skills alone. L-1B requires specialized knowledge of the petitioner's own product, processes or procedures; general programming competence available in the labour market does not qualify. The case rests on what he knows about this company's firmware and commissioning method.
Name the knowledge the company owns
USCIS reads specialized knowledge against the organization, not the trade. A control technologist who could be hired from any industrial-automation firm has valuable skills, but they are not special to the petitioner and an L-1B petition built on them will be denied or challenged. The technologist in this example qualifies, if he does, because he helped write the moisture-control tuning tables in the company's dryer firmware, knows the interaction between its aeration controller and third-party sensors, and has commissioned dozens of installations using a sequence the company developed. The petition should describe those things concretely, explain that the knowledge took years of internal work to acquire, and state what the U.S. affiliate's installers cannot currently do. Comparing him with other employees helps: if only two people in the company can tune the firmware, that is evidence; if every technician has it, that fact is relevant but not dispositive, because company-wide knowledge can still qualify when the process is complex and requires substantial internal training.
Hypothetical example: an industrial calibration specialist knows the company's proprietary moisture-sensor mapping process, while several ordinary technicians can install the same hardware. A first review should identify the confidential process, how the employee learned it, who else has it and which U.S. task specifically needs it. Version histories, internal training records and a redacted troubleshooting report are better evidence than a job title. The organization must also show the employee completed an uninterrupted qualifying overseas year in the relevant three-year lookback. Keep the employment dates on a separate exhibit, because company-specific knowledge and foreign-service duration are distinct requirements. A common failure is describing general skill in highly technical language without showing why the petitioner, rather than the industry generally, depends on it.