I am planning to apply for the exceptional talent route in the Global Talent Visa, and would appreciate feedback on my list of documents. I’m a Software Engineer currently with 8 years of professional working experience.
Recommendation Letters:
Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, he was my last manager.
VP of Engineering at an ECommerce firm I used to work for.
CEO of a company I used to work for. We worked at two other companies together.
Mandatory Criteria
Offer letter from a company I used to work for. It was double the average pay in Nigeria.
Offer letter from another company. It was 4x the average pay in Nigeria.
I spoke as a panel at an engineering and tech event. I plan to include screenshots of the invitation, pictures of myself speaking and poster of the event
Optional Criteria
OC1: how I lead the development of a tool that helped improve developer productivity from 50 minutes to 2 minutes. I plan to include my managers comment on this tool and how it improved productivity. it isn’t an official letter of reference. the evidence is from an internal feedback tool.
OC1: Screenshot of how my salary from A to B and with merit increase and bonus included.
OC1: how I lead and built an internal tool that was demoed to a leadership team. Managers comment also included.
OC2: Various contributions to open source. One of the projects helps individuals discover tech communities to connect with. I’m the second highest contributor to the project. I also open sourced a URL shortener project I built many years ago. I also the screenshots of my contributions to each projects and the badges I got from them.
OC2: I volunteer at an academy to teach students how to code for 3 months. Previously, I have also did a talk at the same academy. I have a letter of reference from the CEO and founder of the academy.
OC3: I was the only backend developer on a project where I built an application for a client. I plan to include a contributor analysis graph for both the backend and frontend alongside the design of the final app.
OC3: A project I built for a previous employer. I plan to include commit history, contributor analysis graph for it and the screenshot of the final project. The VP in my LOR mentioned this project in his letter.
Do you think all my evidences are enough for an exceptional talent application?
Your mandatory seems weak. Are you having an invitation email or any official selection for you to speak in that event? I am not sure how strong is the evidence of job offers?! Does it meet respond well to having national or international recognition! Also, You can have two optional criteria and not 3.
Hi @Maya thanks for the review. I have an invitation to speak at the event.
I didn’t know I can only have two optional criteria. In that case, I’ll move the OC3 into MC as it can also come in as the leading the growth of a product-led digital technology company
MC: offer letters are not evidence of proving yourself as a leader in digital technology sector. Your first two evidences won’t count, they are not valid evidences.
ensure you include the scale of the panel event
you need to have 3-4 strong evidences in MC
OC1: you need to prove product or digital innovation here backed by your significant contributions, impact and strong third party backing support. Just comments are weak support. Also presentation to the leadership is not strong enough evidence of innovation.
OC2: looks fine. Was the mentorship a structured program?
OC3; first evidence is largely self-documentation, you need third party validation to back your claims.
Also you can only select 2 OCs.
Lastly, focus on the quality and depth of evidences more - it’s hard to comment if the above will be enough. A lot depends on the content and details of these documents. But as per the above you should strengthen your MC, OC2 looks good to keep considering your evidence mentioned and pick one out of OC1 or OC3 but need more than self-documentation to create a strong backing.
Thanks @pahuja for the review. Would adding a letter of reference stating the impact of both innovations in OC1 support my case? Also, same question for OC3.
Letters are good but not enough as per guidelines.
Would you have any news articles validating the product in market, traction of revenue, any real user testimonials, proof of product in market, awards, code commits showing your name?
@Oladips I have submitted my employment contracts from previous three jobs as a single evidence under OC1 and it was sucessful. If at all you want to add a evidence under MC for related to your job, it should be a proof of high renumeration and prove how you it is 4 times the average pay in the relevant field.
Note : It’s only considered high pay when it is above the average of your field in your country and not nation’s average pay.
About your open source contribution, it comes down the number of stars and forks the repository you have contributed to.