Sponsor Licence

How can your IT company benefit from obtaining a sponsor licence?

By Amer Zaman

on April 8, 2023

Read Time: 7 Minutes

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The tech sector has undoubtedly been one of the UK’s economic success stories of recent times. It was this industry that, according to a State of the Tech Workforce UK report by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), employed just under two million workers in 2021, making up 6.3% of the total workforce in the UK.

Swift advancements in technology have helped open up exciting opportunities in the UK’s information technology (IT) sector over the last few years. Alongside this, however, there have been pressing concerns about skills shortages among tech-industry employers.

These anecdotal concerns have been borne out in the statistics. A 2022 People and Skills Report by Tech Nation, drawing upon data from a jobs search engine, revealed that tech job opportunities had reached their highest level in a decade. The research showed that tech roles made up 14% of all job opportunities in the UK last year, a significant rise from the 11% recorded in 2019.

Fast-forward to January 2023, and it was reported that nearly 95% of employers seeking out tech talent had encountered a skills shortage over the past year. This finding backed up a report from a month earlier, indicating that a quarter of UK businesses were looking abroad for tech talent.

If, then, you are an IT-sector employer in the UK, you might be all too familiar with struggling to find the right people possessing the most suitable skills. Could it be the answer, then, for you to obtain a sponsor licence from the Home Office, so that your organisation can more easily employ someone to work for you from overseas?

What are the advantages of a sponsor licence for tech-sector employers?

There are various benefits that your company in the IT sector could stand to gain if it is approved for a sponsor licence by the Home Office. These include:

• Validation of your legitimacy and integrity. The best talents from abroad will want to be assured that your organisation is a professional, legitimate, and reputable one in its field. Of course, when you are seeking to appeal to foreign nationals, you should be conveying your company’s integrity in a range of ways. However, the fact that the sponsor licence needs to granted by the Home Office means that your status as a licensed sponsor can stand as a further indicator of your legitimacy as a business.
• Access to an expanded talent pool. As we referenced above, while there is a lot of demand from employers for tech talent, it isn’t always easy for firms in the IT industry to fill their open vacancies – recent research indicates that almost seven in 10 (68%) businesses are being held back by a lack of tech skills. Being granted a sponsor licence could give your firm a powerful means of remedying that situation. Many specialised tech skills are difficult to find in UK workers, but are possessed by foreign nationals who may be interested in coming to work in the UK.
• The opportunity to boost long-term staff retention. There is not, of course, any guarantee that any given employee at your company will stay with you for a given length of time. However, it is worth noting that if your organisation uses its sponsor licence to recruit someone from overseas who arrives in the UK on a Skilled Worker visa, they will be able to stay in the UK for up to five years before needing to extend their visa. Furthermore, if they wish to switch to a different job with another employer during their time in the UK, they will need to apply to the Home Office to update their visa. These factors could mean that in your capacity as a licensed sponsor, an overseas national you hire may be less likely than your UK-settled workers to leave your company. This, in turn, could support your efforts to achieve sustained employee retention, stability, and growth for your business.
• Improved diversity within your workforce. Employers in the IT sector do not only seek to increase diversity in their workforces purely for the sake of diversity itself. That’s because many tech companies also recognise how greater diversity across their staff teams, with the diversity of ideas that can arise from different cultural backgrounds, can help the wider company to innovate and optimise its competitiveness. This consideration is, of course, additional to the high-level skills and experiences that foreign national workers can bring to UK companies.
• Broadened opportunities for your company. While it might be far from the main reason for you seeking to employ a particular overseas worker, it might be that the person you do hire could help your business to branch out into new markets, or otherwise provide a new direction for your company that may not have happened in their absence. At the very least, a talented foreign-national worker is likely to bring an important new dynamic to your tech-sector business, and they might even help to grow your organisation’s reputation beyond the UK’s borders.  

Allow Cranbrook Legal to help your IT company with its application for a sponsor licence

For all manner of employers in the UK – within and outside the tech sector – being granted a sponsor licence by the Home Office could make a big difference to their ability to attract the talent they need to fill their vacancies. This, in turn, could be key to their efforts to achieve sustained growth for their business.

If you would like to learn more about our start-to-finish service whereby we will help you with every aspect of your organisation’s sponsor licence application, please don’t hesitate to arrange a free consultation with our team in central London. You can also call us on 0208 215 0053.