UK Talent Visa tips for an engineer

This is the recap for a Twitter thread of the same topic (thread).

I’ll try to cover the points that aren’t easily derived from public docs, and are based on the lawyer advices I personally received, as well a number of other people stories who were granted this visa.

I won’t be repeating publicly available info; your best place to start is the official guideline: https://technation.io/visa-tech-nation-visa-guide/#overview

The first topic that scares most people away is the Recommendation Letters. As official guideline says there must be 3 different letters, from executive level staff (excluding the HR). They must be specifically addressed to an endorsing body (Tech Nation) in this case.

So the very first thought is who can actually provide such letters for your specific case?

In case of an engineer, the best candidates are Head of Functions (Head of Mobile / Engineering, Web Development). Lead / Staff / Principal engineers are unfortunately not a good option (I don’t know a single case where it worked), even if they’re Google Dev Experts.

Additionally, Head of Your Department is also pretty safe bet. They’re usually much more business oriented folks, but that’s totally fine. It is also not strictly required that you should have directly reported to that person.

If you’ve been working in one company for last ~6 years, you can try and find your colleagues who moved on to other companies, or founded their own ones. Say if worked on 3 products in the same company, and 2 Heads moved on to different companies, it will tick two boxes.

If you ever presented on or organised a conference, maybe done a shared pet project, or massively contributed to someone open-source project, or engaged in some capacity with someone who’s currently a Head or Chief, than this person will do too.

Once you figured our who to ask for recommendation letter it’s time to begin writing those. Yep, recommendation letters are rarely written by the ones who signs them. Rule of thumb — to prepare a “draft” you would be totally fine to get signed without changes.

Letters better have a standard structure: introduction of a signee, their experience, current occupation; how did they know you and you worked together.

Now the most important part in the letter: they should state your achievements. Let’s overview some examples in details, what those achievements can be.

Important disclaimer: since December 2020, proofs of continued learning and improvement are no longer accepted. Previously online courses and various certifications had been accepted as a proof of talent, now they are not.

Sole or main ownership of a core library or framework. Rec. letter may describe this library in details; how it impacted the product: i.g. increases in loading speeds by 50% or reduces in errors by 20% increased user conversions, or maybe simply reduced development costs.

Note that this business impact coverage is super important, but the exact metrics not that much. It’s okay if those metrics have been lost, or if they were too low level and never actually translated to business KPIs. Do you best to estimate the impact in a hindsight.

Big role in bootstrapping a new product of a company. If you were a sole engineering working on a new product from scratch. No need to have a high role to make an impact in such a setup.

In this case metrics should be pretty obvious: new users, new revenues, user satisfaction score. If it’s a separate app then the rating will be the best option.

If you were rewarded significant bonuses, stocks or above the market salary, this can also be mentioned, though shouldn’t be an only point obviously.

Your achievements is obviously the biggest section of the letter. Don’t be dry here, explain your contribution in detail, in different words, with numbers and metrics. Always keep in mind the person who’s supposed to sign this.

Those were internal contributions, but the most important part is the external recognition. While Promising Talent applicant can get away without any current recognition only by demonstrating a potential, Exceptional Talent must some record already.

By the public nature of such achievements, it’s fine for any signee to just list all of those in the letter without being super specific as in “I’m aware that X is well regarded public speaker and gave a speech on Y”. This will later be reinforced with supporting documents.

If the signee profile implies some professional understanding of your public materials, you might put some personal judgements like “that conference topic was incredibly fresh and innovative”. Head of Business probably shouldn’t comment on your article about Coroutines 😬

Here your options are quite endless. It can be conferences, meetups, tech articles, authoring online courses, speaking on podcasts etc. State the biggest and most important ones in the letters, the rest you’ll attach in supporting documents.

And finish the letter with your future plans. Smth like “I’m aware that X is going to setup his own startup”. This one is important, you don’t wanna be looking is someone who just wanna drop the shackles of Tier 2 slavery. You’re expected to have some impactful plans.

This btw is also required in your Personal Statement. Detailed business plan isn’t needed here, but try exploring your opportunities here. Maybe your niche consultancy / joining an incubator / making your pet project an official business.

Also you need to describe why UK is a good option for your endeavours, and how UK will benefit from having you. Don’t overkill here, you’re requesting a visa, not government funding. Few lines like “crypto booms, could use some talent” will do the trick.

Now just a couple of technical live hacks. Letter requires a Headed Paper. There’s no strict definition of what Headed Paper is, neither there’s a way to validate that a document having the company’s logo and address is the official Headed Paper.

In many cases even the departments in mid-large companies have their own layouts for different purposes. So in this case, a basic Word document, with manually added headers, logos from Google, and a company address will be enough.

If you manage to get a signature on this custom layout, it pretty much means that the signee is okay with such layout, and so will be Tech Nation. You’ll also need a telephone and email contact of a signee. For highest level officers — a phone of a secretary will be fine.

So the simplest workflow for all letters — make a layout with company logo in Word / Google Doc, insert your text there, send for a review, when reviewed upload to DocuSign and resend for the signature.

Now the remaining part is proof documents. You can attach max 10 of those, 3 pages each. Easiest one is your employment contract extract. Either 3 first pages, or you can cut most important parts from there (remuneration, responsibilities, reporting lines).

Another one is stocks/options certificates. If you have an internal tool for them, screenshots will do.

For your conferences try and find any recordings. You can put links for the videos to the doc, along with a screenshot from YouTube showing viewings. Don’t be shy if you don’t have millions there. Links to official announcement will do too.

For a biggest conference you can request some sort of a participation letter. Mobius did one for me, stating number of people in the room and on the live stream.

Take a screenshot of viewing statistics in your techblog. And a screenshot of all articles there. This will be another document.

Weird advise: try googling yourself. You might discover that you were referred in someone else’s article. This would make a good additional document. If there’re many mentions of you, probably better pack it into one document.

Internal contributions proofs might be tougher. Try using some repository commit statistics tools that can demonstrate that you’re the main contributor. Or the dependency charting tools to prove that you artifact is indeed core to the product.

If you are still shy on documents, you can include additional letters following pretty much the same pattern as recommendation letters. You choice for signee will be less restricted here and you can find someone who’s able to tell something new about you.

And that would be it. Have someone native to spell check everything, and you’re ready to apply. I might take a look too shall someone here need my help.

And if you’re only in the beginning of your career, hope it really helps to know what kind of activities will matter in couple years time.