My experience applying for a Global Talent Visa
“Global talent visa enables the brightest and best tech talent from around the world to come and work in the UK’s digital technology sector, contributing their cutting-edge expertise, creativity and innovation to maintaining the UK’s position at the forefront of the global digital economy.” — Tech Nation
An endorsement is required to apply for the global talent visa category, which is open to talents in academia or research, arts and culture, and digital technology. Tech Nation is the body that endorses individuals for digital technology and already provides an exhaustive guide to help you throughout your visa application. You’re expected to review the guide several times and reference it throughout your application process. I’ll focus on compiling your application and whatever isn’t on Tech Nation’s website and also write a bit about settling in the UK. I also recommend watching How To Get Tech Nation Visa by Peace Itimi before you begin your global talent visa journey.
For you to be considered for an endorsement, you should be able to prove that you’re a leader (or promising leader) in digital technology both at work and outside of work. You should note your achievements in tech for the past five years and perhaps create a mood board to help visualize them. You might even remember more that way, which was the approach I used because I had forgotten a bunch of them. This is why it’s great to document your journey at certain stages in life :)
I wanted to submit my document at a specific time, so I gave myself a week to send out my recommendation letters. It might help to ask your recommenders to send you a voice note that answers the questions required by Tech Nation, which you can find on the document checklist. After they send the voice note, you should transcribe, touch it up and send it back to them to review, approve and add their company’s letter heading.
For your Personal Statement, ensure it’s coherent with the rest of your application. Aside from answering the questions they listed, write a bit about yourself. It might help to tell a short story about how you got into tech and how it led to your present career. Ensure to mention some of your achievements in your statement as well, and explain how you could replicate these achievements in the UK.
I don’t see myself as someone great at writing — and neither am I terrible at it — but I had to pay for Grammarly’s premium account to help reduce writing mistakes before sending my documents to my friends (Simbiat, Fawaz, Dami and Kingsley) to help review since they’re all excellent writers.
Since I created a mood board for my pieces of evidence, I moved a lot faster when it was time to write. I prepared ten documents: four under the mandatory criteria and six under the optional criteria.
The mandatory criteria documents were filled with the following:
- Screenshots of my work contributors graph on GitHub and the title of technical documents written.
- Screenshots of my personal GitHub profile highlighting a few of my open-source projects.
- Screenshots of the email conversation I had with Smashing Magazine highlighting my articles’ pageviews and some of the ones I reviewed.
- Screenshots of the workshops and talks I gave in the past.
And my optional criteria documents were filled with the following:
- Screenshots of the contribution graph of a gig I did outside of work. I also added a screenshot from a popular publication featuring the product and how it performed within a few months of going live.
- Screenshots of my StackOverflow profile.
- Screenshots of my involvement in mentoring a group of 100 developers for ALC with Google.
- Screenshots of websites that referred to the articles I published with Smashing Magazine.
- Screenshots of my payslips over time.
You should also go through the examples Tech Nation shared on their website. Annotate the screenshots and add relevant links to where they were taken so they can be verified if necessary.
After all of these, I submitted my documents to Tech Nation and got an endorsement within two weeks. Note that you’re not submitting any of the abovementioned documents to the Home Office. Afterwards, I applied for the visa with just my endorsement and tuberculosis medical report. I didn’t submit any bank statement or letter of employment in the UK. I got my visa back within a month and flew to the UK.
Settling in the UK
I recommend watching Peace Itimi’s Moving to & settling in the UK. As soon as you are in the UK, you should go pick up your BRP because you’ll need it to register with a bank. Revolut will allow opening an account with your international passport, but you’ll also need it to prove your right to rent and right to work in the UK.
If you have a USD card, you’ll be able to use it in stores to buy stuff, but it won’t work on most checkouts. I brought some cash (£1k) with me nevertheless and paid it to my bank account as soon as I opened one. The easiest way to be able to pay for basic things that don’t necessarily require you to visit a store, like house rent, is to convert some of your USDT (if you have any) to GBP and send it to your bank till you start getting paid in the UK.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me or any of the alumni you know, and we’ll be more than happy to help. The first interaction I had with Peace Itimi was after I got endorsed to ask for recommendations as regards the IHS fees which didnt really matter as I decided to just pay for the entire duration.
I’ll update this article with FAQs as soon as they come in so that others can access these answers.
This was a team effort, and asides Peace Itimi, my colleagues and some of my friends that I mentioned earlier, some amazing people (Tomisin, Abdulmujeeb and Seunla) also helped in one way or the other.
Best of luck! ✌️
