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The Skilled Worker visa, explained

Employers usually approach this route by asking whether the person qualifies. The route asks first about the job: what the work is, how it is classified, what it pays and whether it genuinely exists. The candidate becomes relevant after those questions have been answered.

The whole route is built around a job. An employer able to sponsor identifies a role, matches it to an occupation in a published classification, satisfies itself that the role meets the requirements attached to that occupation, and records all of that when it assigns a worker to the role. What the individual is later permitted to do in the United Kingdom runs off that record, and so does everything the employer will be asked about if the sponsorship is ever examined.

This is why two hires that feel identical inside a business can behave entirely differently. The requirements attaching to a role follow the occupation it has been matched to, and occupations come from a national classification designed to describe the labour market as a whole rather than to describe how any particular company organises its teams. A job title that makes perfect sense internally can sit some distance from the classification, and that distance is where the trouble begins.

What follows is what the route asks of a role, how jobs get matched to it, and where assignments come apart.

The route tests the job

Three things about a role are assessed, and the published rules set the standard for each of them. The first is that the job is genuine: real work that needs doing, duties the person will actually perform, and a vacancy that would exist whether or not this candidate had appeared. Genuineness is not only assessed at the outset. It can be revisited later, by comparing the role as described with the contract, the payroll and what the person does on an ordinary day.

The second is skill level. The rules set a level the occupation must reach, and they specify which occupations sit inside the route, which sit outside it, and which are subject to separate arrangements. Those lists are revised, sometimes materially, so a role that qualified when a business last recruited may not qualify on the same terms now, and the current published position is the only one worth planning against.

The third is pay. There is a general floor and there is a figure published for the specific occupation, and the requirement is generally the higher of whichever apply to the role, with discounts and variations available in defined circumstances. What counts towards the figure is narrower than employers expect. Guaranteed basic pay for the contracted hours ordinarily counts. Allowances, bonuses, overtime, commission, benefits and equity ordinarily do not, whatever they are worth to the employee. Because the requirement is worked out against contracted hours, part-time arrangements, reduced hours and variable hours contracts each change the analysis rather than scaling it proportionately.

Matching a job to an occupation

The matching exercise looks clerical and is the most consequential judgement in the route. The occupation chosen fixes the pay requirement and describes what the worker is in the country to do. Everything after it inherits that choice.

It goes wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with immigration. Internal job titles are commercial artefacts. They are inflated to attract candidates, adjusted for client facing seniority, and shaped by internal grading structures that exist for pay review purposes. A person whose title includes the word head may do work that classifies well below it, and a modestly titled specialist may be doing work that classifies well above. The classification is interested in duties, and duties are what somebody will eventually read the contract to find.

The second failure is working backwards. An employer decides what it wishes to pay, then looks for an occupation whose published rate sits at or below that figure, then writes a job description that points towards it. On paper the file is consistent. It stops being consistent the moment anyone compares the description with the work, the team structure or the person's own account of their week.

The third is drift, and it is rarely dishonest. Businesses that are growing quickly hire people to do whatever most needs doing, and the role described at the point of assignment can diverge from the role being performed some way down the line without anybody deciding to mislead the Home Office. Certain changes have to be reported, and certain changes go further than reporting and require the position to be revisited. The distinction between the two is genuinely technical and is a poor candidate for guesswork.

The matching exercise is best approached as a question of evidence. The useful test is whether the description of the role could be supported by the contract, the organisation chart, the payroll and the employee, if all four were consulted separately and without warning.

Salary is a continuing condition, not a one off test

Employers tend to treat the salary requirement as a hurdle cleared at the start. It attaches to the sponsored role for as long as the sponsorship lasts, and ordinary employment events interact with it in ways that go unnoticed.

A move to part-time hours, an unpaid sabbatical, a period of reduced hours agreed to help somebody through a difficult year, a restructuring that changes duties, and in some cases a promotion, all touch the position. So does the passage of time on its own, because the published rates are revised while a business runs its pay reviews on an entirely separate cycle set by its own budget. A salary that sat comfortably above the requirement when it was assigned may not sit comfortably above the requirement that applies when the position is looked at again, and very few pay review processes are designed with that in mind.

Promotion deserves particular care, because it is the one that feels like good news. Moving somebody into a materially different job may move them into a different occupation, with a different published rate and a different description of what they are here to do. A promotion put through without anybody checking that can turn a decision everyone intended well into a problem.

Where assignments come apart

The certificate of sponsorship is the employer's own record of the job, created by the employer, and it is the document the application is judged against. It is a representation about the role, made by the business, in advance.

The recurring problems are mundane. A job description lifted from the recruitment advert rather than from the contract, so it describes an aspiration. A salary figure that quietly includes something that does not count. Hours that do not match the contract that was eventually signed. A start date that then has to move for ordinary commercial reasons. An occupation chosen before the duties were settled. Each of these is small, and each of them creates an inconsistency that sits on file waiting to be found.

Not everything can be tidied up afterwards. Once a certificate has been used, the practical remedy for some errors is to do the whole thing again, with the cost and the delay that implies. The capacity to assign is also not unlimited, and increasing what a business is able to assign is a separate request with its own timing, which is a poor thing to discover in the week an offer was meant to go out.

The single most expensive habit is assigning early to save time, while the commercial terms are still being negotiated. The certificate then records a version of the job that the parties go on to change. Everything after that point is an exercise in explaining a discrepancy that need never have existed.

What is not worth doing

Some hires should not be run through this route, and recognising that before recruitment starts saves the business and the candidate a great deal.

The route follows genuine employment by the sponsor. Arrangements where the person will in practice be working under another business's direction, or will be placed with a client to fill that client's role, sit awkwardly with that and attract particular scrutiny. So do arrangements that are contracting in substance and employment only in form. Where a business is being asked to sponsor somebody it will not really direct, the question to resolve is who the employer actually is, and it should be resolved before anything is assigned.

Nor is it worth reshaping a role to fit. If the job only qualifies after it has been rewritten, the honest conclusion is that this route may be the wrong instrument for this role. There may be another route, or the hire may be a domestic one, and both of those are better outcomes than a sponsorship built on a description that cannot be defended.

Short engagements deserve a hard look before anyone starts. The obligations attaching to a sponsored role continue after the work that prompted it has finished, and a piece of work with a natural end may not justify them.

Above all, it is not worth beginning any of this before establishing what permission the person already has. Some candidates do not need sponsoring at all, and that is the cheapest possible answer to the entire question.

This guide is general information, not legal or immigration advice. Regulated immigration advice is provided with regulated partners. Nothing here is advice until terms are agreed in writing.