I recently changed jobs and had to give up my company iPad from my former employer, on which I was logged in to iCloud, in exchange for a different company iPad from my new employer. Both devices were/are locked down to varying degrees. For the most part I have more control of how my new device is set up but am unable to log myself in to iCloud for any purpose or duration. I can mostly live with this except for one thing – I use Text Replacement constantly, on all of my devices for work and personal, and the replacement snippets sync over iCloud, and since I can’t log in to iCloud on the new iPad, I would have to enter all of my snippets manually (to say nothing of having to manage manually in the future). I have way too many snippets for this to be a reasonable option. I found I can select all of these snippets on my Mac and export them to a Plist file. Was able to email the file to myself and access through gmail on the new iPad, save to Files for import, but can’t find a way to access this file from within Settings… there are only 2 controls under Text Replacement screen, the “+” to add a new snippet manually, and “Edit”, which does nothing. I’m out of ideas, this feels like a dead end. Any other options I’m not thinking about?? Thanks in advance!
*Edit: I know about Text Expander; it doesn’t work effectively in the browser, where I spend all of my time at work.
Are you not allowed to use your personal iCloud account, or any iCloud account? If this is set up with another iCloud account, any way to log into that one from a Mac? Then you could import there and it would sync to the iPad.
I’m not aware of any import function for text replacement on iPadOS. There are very few areas in iPadOS’s Settings where files can be imported; Apple expects everyone to use iCloud to move data around in this sensitive area.
You could try manually syncing the iPad and the Mac, if your work allows it. I don’t know if this would move the text-replacement data. But even so, this sync might require logging into the same Apple ID on both devices.
Does your work use any mobile device management (MDM) system? If so, maybe text replacement settings can be part of a device profile? That would be a question for the IT department.
ANY iCloud account. That’s a good idea though, wouldn’t have thought to try that.
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I will try to connect via cable, thanks for the tip. Yeah we have device mgmt software and contract out all IT needs but Ive only had to interact with them once to allow Sheets to be installed on my device. Their “fix” made the app accessible from my device but I never could install it because the mgmt software prohibits the use of AppleID, which I needed for the download 
Just drag and drop the .plist file into the Text replacements window and you should see them magically appear.
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I can’t do this… the management software on the iPad doesn’t allow me to access it with my cursor from another computer (I always forget what this feature is called… sidecar maybe?).
Update - tried plugging in, I can drag the plist file onto the iPad once it was sync’ed up but there’s nowhere to drop it that makes it accessible from the iPad in any capacity. Frustratingly, the Files app is also not listed in the “Files” tab, so that’s no even an option. There are 10 application folders listed here, I can drop the plist file in any one of those, but can’t then import from there to the settings app. Im honestly about to just start manually re-creating my most commonly used snippets and be done with it.
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Sorry, I missed that part. My instructions were to be done on a Mac.
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If it’s not too painful, you could ask the IT contractors if they could add the text expansions to your iPad (using their MDM system). I have no idea if this is even possible, but it might be worth an email.