Encouraging the ‘best and the brightest’ into the UK workforce: A guide
As part of its Points-Based Immigration System, the UK government has two visa routes which, it says, will “help attract the best talent from around the world and ensure that businesses can recruit the most highly qualified from across the globe.”
These two visa routes are the Graduate visa, which opened in July 2021, and the High Potential Individual visa (“HPI”) which opened on 30 May 2022.
These visa routes are intended to target recent graduates and allow them to remain, or come to, the UK to work without first being sponsored by a UK-based employer.
As with all visa routes, there are particular rules to be met for each of these two routes, and various points to bear in mind if you are a graduate job seeker or a recruiting employer.
Graduate Visa
The Graduate visa is open to those who studied in the UK. The eligibility requirements are few, compared to many other visa routes including the Skilled Worker visa.
To be eligible for a Graduate visa, a person needs to be applying from within the UK. They need to have studied – and have successfully completed – a course in the UK for which they were granted a Student visa, and they need to apply for this route immediately after graduating from their relevant course. A person seeking to apply for the Graduate visa must have most recently been on a Student visa in the UK, in order to apply. If a person switched onto another visa route at the end of their course, it will not be open to them to then switch onto the Graduate visa.
High Potential Individual Visa
The High Potential Individual visa is similar in its purpose to the Graduate visa. While the Graduate visa aims to retain talent, the HPI aims to attract it.
To be eligible for the HPI visa, an applicant must have graduated from their university course in the five years prior to application. They need to have studied at a university on the annually-updated list of highest ranking international universities. The list of ranked universities is made up of “establishments from Top 50 rankings which appeared on 2 or more lists.”
This year, the list is dominated by the Ivy League universities of the USA, although there are a select number of European and other international universities too. Note that this visa is not open to those who studied at a university in the UK, regardless of how highly ranked that university is.
The Graduate visa and the HPI visa are similar in aim and requirements, and the main points can be summarised as follows:
Detail | Graduate visa | HPI visa |
General requirements | To have graduated from the course for which you were granted a UK Student visa. | To have graduated, in the last five years, from a university on the list of most highly ranked international institutions. |
Immigration requirements | Your last period of leave to remain in the UK must have been as a student. You must be in the UK to apply. | You can apply from outside or inside the UK. You can apply to switch to this visa from certain other routes, as long as you graduated no more than five years ago. |
What does it cost? | Application fee: £715 Immigration Health Surcharge: £624 per year of leave granted. | Ecctis mandatory verification of your degree: £210 - £252 Application fee: £715 Immigration Health Surcharge: £624 per year of leave granted Saving to support yourself upon arrival in the UK: £1,270 |
What you get | You will be given a fixed-term period of two years leave to remain. This cannot be extended or renewed. This is not a route to settlement. If you have a PhD, your period of leave will be three years instead of two. | |
Do I need to have a job lined up? | No, you are free to remain in the UK to look for a job, or to accept a job offer which has already been made. Note that you will not be allowed to claim benefits during any period of unemployment or job hunting. You are tied to an employer but can change jobs throughout your period of leave. | |
Two sides to every coin
The particular features of the Graduate visa and the HPI visa may be equally of benefit and detriment to both employees and employers, depending on the aims of everyone involved.
The standout difference between the Graduate and HPI visas compared to the Skilled Worker visa is flexibility. A migrant on either the Graduate or HPI routes is free to work anywhere they like, as well as remain in the UK to look for a job. They are not tied to a single employer or a particular field. This high degree of flexibility may be of interest to recent graduates who are not yet sure where they want to work, or how long they intend to continue living in the UK.
Similarly, for a company seeking to employ a graduate migrant worker, the flexibility to employ them without having to sponsor their visa and commit to a minimum salary threshold may be attractive.
The other side of this particular coin is, of course, lack of certainty for both employer and employee. An employer who employs a migrant without sponsoring them on a Skilled Worker visa has no certainty that the employee – whose immigration status is not ‘tied’ to their place of employment – will continue in their employment if a better offer comes along.
From the employee’s perspective, if they were to be on a Skilled Worker visa, they may take comfort in knowing that a company who has invested the time and money in sponsoring them as a Skilled Worker is perhaps less likely to terminate their employment if the employment market changes. With more flexibility comes less reliability.
Perhaps the most obvious benefit to workers on the Graduate and the HPI visa routes is that it allows graduates to “test the waters” of both life in the UK and employment in a particular role.
For smaller employers and businesses, who have not previously had to venture into the world of Sponsor Licences and Home Office compliance, employing a person on the Graduate or HPI visa may let them decide if the employee in question is worth the expense of obtaining a Sponsor Licence for with a view to longer-term employment.
It might be considered that employers could take advantage of the graduate and HPI visa routes (which have no minimum salary requirements) by paying lower salaries to recent graduates than they would otherwise be able to, but in practice this is unlikely to be the case.
In the first instance, those on the HPI visa who have recently qualified from one of the world’s highest ranked universities are not likely to accept a role for which they are not being well compensated, and, as noted above, the flexibility of being able to work (or look for work) anywhere while on a Graduate visa would allow a worker to walk away from a job if better-paid employment came along.
A significant benefit to employers is that firms which do not have sponsor licences in place already, and which do not intend to apply for one yet, now have the opportunity to attract and employ some of the best graduates in the world where previously they might not have been able to compete with business who already had sponsor licences in place.
The future of the best and the brightest
As neither of these visas are routes to settlement, and they cannot be renewed beyond their two (or three) year period of leave to remain, the government is banking on the fact that allowing graduates a two year grant of leave will be enough to convince them to stay on in the UK and switch to a Skilled Worker visa further down the line, thereby continuing to invest their skill sets in the UK economy.
According to the Minister for Safe and Legal Migration Kevin Foster MP,, the HPI visa route “will enable those who have already demonstrated their potential through academic achievement to come to the UK without a prior job offer,” while the Graduate route was lauded as allowing the UK to retain the “best and the brightest international students”
Whether or not these goals will ultimately be met remains to be seen, but for both employers and employees looking to make their first ventures into the realms of international employment, the Graduate and High Potential Individual visas seem to be very attractive options for all involved.