[Endorsed] Applied for Talent, got promise

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Hi Everyone! I recently applied for a Global Talent Visa under the technical route, and the advice on this forum has been incredibly helpful throughout the process. I’m sharing my experience to help others in the future.

I applied for talent since I thought I met the criteria, but got promise. I’m happy with that, but if anyone has inputs on what I could have done differently, please do share.

Timeline: Applied on March 9th, got endorsed on March 20th. I wasn’t tracking edits too closely, but I did see at least 3 edits. I applied from inside the UK.

Criteria Selected: MC, OC2, OC4.

Years of Experience: Just under 5 as a Software Engineer, including at FAANG.

References:

LoR1: Director from FAANG company talking about my leadership of a project, and it’s impact (worldwide media coverage, adoption etc.)

LoR2: Director from previous team in FAANG, talking about my contributions and impact to a novel infrastructural project with great impact.

LoR3: Professor who I published research with.

Evidences:

MC:

  1. Global Media Coverage of my feature, along with proof of my leadership of that feature.
  2. Speaking engagement at a top developer conference. The conference had >1000 attendees.
  3. Salary consistently showing top 1-2% income in UK over the past few years.
  4. Strong performance.

OC2: Contributions outside of work

  1. (RE-USED) Speaking engagement
  2. GitHub repo owned, and maintained by me. Numerous stars/forks and contributions from the community.
  3. Mentoring
  4. Increasing access to the tech sector - shown through bonuses etc.

OC4: Academic contributions

  1. Published research in a top journal (think Nature, Science) (I was not the first author)
  2. Impact of research. e.g. citations, use in digital products with 10000s of users.
  3. Academic track record at top-ranked universities including distinction.

Personal Statement: Tied it all together, and added a brief note on my wish to contribute more outside of my core work through mentoring/advising etc. Also briefly explained why the UK was a good fit.

Retrospective:

  1. I delayed applying for this for a while because I wasn’t sure if I had a strong enough profile. So I would recommend others who are on the fence to try - you might be surprised.
  2. I wasn’t sure if not being first author affected the strength of evidence (8). Ultimately, it worked out, although perhaps this played a part in why I got promise and not talent.
  3. Related to the above point, although I’m happy with promise, perhaps I should have gone for the standard OC2 and OC3 combo and re-used my MC along with some additional evidence for OC3. Any thoughts?

Hope this helps people out!

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Exceptional Talent is for 5 Year+ of Experience in the Tech Industry and Promise is for <5 years of Experience. It wasn’t because of the strength of your Evidence but the number of years of experience.

Also, work done during your study is typically not counted as part of your years of experience. So I guess " Academic track record at top-ranked universities including distinction." might have further indicated you have lesser years of work experience.

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Yeah possibly, thanks for sharing your analysis. I thought the 5 years of work experience was more of a guideline rather than a requirement. Is that not so?

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I think so too.you evidence was strong for talent but your profile must have shown less than 5 years experience. Some assessor would have assessed you for talent. We have seen cases of people with less than 5 years experience who got upgraded to promise. I guess different assessors look at different things.

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Can you share more about this @PSP2000? The bonus is for you isn’t it? Why did you consider it under contributions outside work?

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It was a work program but not related to my job. I volunteered and got recognized for it.

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I was surprised because you gave example of bonus. Thanks for the clarification.