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Perspectives To Soldiers' Professional DevelopmentTuominen, Juha I.Leadership NetworksKnowledge Networks, Organizations, Egocentic Networks, Leadership, Learning CommmunitiesSUN.AM1The aim of this paper is to analyze a company commander's activity within his workplace community and external professional network in the Finnish DefenceForces (FDF) context. Relationship‐based learning underlines horizontal growth and interactive relations in working life. The professional development of aperson includes constantly increasing competence, which results from both developing expertise and expanding personal networks. The relationship‐basedlearning is closely related to the concept of protean career, which involves the idea that the main sources of professional development in working life are thepeers and other relationships at work. Also, a company commander’s personal life, formal and informal relations and accumulation of experience all affect heror his working behaviours. This is one of the realizations that broaden the perspective on professional development of company commanders from individualachievements to a larger framework of relations, where professional development is contributed to by the interaction of relationship of networks. Thenetworks of company commander do not consist of the people only, but also meditative tools and other intelligent artefacts and this establishes the need toreflect the social networks in an innovative frame of reference of intelligent networks of relations. Social network analysis is a useful tool for the investigationof knowledge flows within organizations. It is important to pay closer attention how soldiers learn from in practice and from their colleagues too. Wenger(1998) introduces the concept of communities of practice and emphasises the meaning of practices in the process of knowledge creation. Knowledge creationand learning take place through complementary processes of participation, which means the daily, situated interactions and shared experiences of members ofthe community working towards common goals. The debate on learning and knowledge creation in organizations has been empowered by many contributorsin the last decade. The idea of learning in an organizational context has its basics in the principles of learning through joint activities and interaction withothers; the central importance of sociocultural theorists. Bereiter (2002) writes about knowledge‐building community. Knowledge building can be described ascollaborative working for developing conceptual creations, for example practices and theories. One of the benefits of knowledge building is that it makes thethinking of the participants with different expertise open and perceptible.