Living and working in the UK on a Skilled Worker visa is like sleeping with one eye open. In a blink, migrants can lose access to their livelihoods and face a 60-day ultimatum to find another job or be deported back to their home countries.
A Skilled Worker visa can only be sponsored by an authorised company in the UK, few as they are. Things can quickly unravel once an employment is terminated. What follows is a frantic race against time where every rejection, delay or dead-end carries the risk of being forced to leave the country.
I spoke with a UK-based tech worker who experienced this distress firsthand. After leaving college in 2021, he worked as a tech creative in Rwanda but soon landed an opportunity to work at a global tech firm. He worked briefly as an intern and then, after becoming a full-time staff, came to the UK through the Skilled Worker visa program. But just as he was settling into his new life and career, a company-wide layoff left him in the lurch.
This is the story of the tech worker, who asked to remain anonymous for job security reasons, as told to .
Welcome to the UK
I attended a session early in 2021 where volunteers were invited to get feedback on their portfolios. I signed up immediately. During that session, I met one of the panel reviewers, a recruiter working at a global tech company. She liked my drive. So, we connected on LinkedIn and kept in touch casually.
By the summer of 2021, she reached out again. There was an internship opportunity at the company—ideal for new graduates. I didn’t need convincing. I applied, went through interviews, and got the position. It was a remote role with the tech company, during a time when the world was still recovering from the 2020 global pandemic. I was based in Rwanda at the time and worked with a team spread across Europe.
I joined a team focused on onboarding experiences for work account users. At the company, I met experienced creatives like myself, widened my network, and committed to a singular goal: to get a full-time offer. I networked, refined my portfolio, and ensured my performance was strong enough and visible to my employer.
When the internship ended, there was a performance evaluation. Fortunately, the company did a headcount and found out that it needed new employees in one of its creative departments. With help from the recruiter, I went through the internal hiring process and secured a full-time offer. Once I got the offer, the company started discussions to relocate me to the UK.
It partnered with an accounting firm to handle everything about my visa paperwork to a temporary accommodation in the UK. When I arrived, they advised me on neighbourhoods to live in, sorting taxes, healthcare, and more.
The process [to get my visa] took over two months. Despite corporate support, I still had to undergo health screenings, a tuberculosis test, and provide documents such as a police report and affidavits explaining discrepancies in my surname. But it was the waiting part that was the hardest: I went weeks without updates, unsure if I should plan or panic. It took a while.
But by 2022, I finally relocated to the UK on the Skilled Worker visa, sponsored by the tech company I worked for.
Fast forward to 2025, after working across various teams in the company, a sudden company-wide layoff came. My name was on the list of employees to be let go.
Find a new sponsor or go home
Within hours of being laid off, the UK Home Office emailed. My visa and stay in the UK was tied to my job, and with the layoff, the sponsorship from my employer had been terminated. I now had 60 days to find a new sponsor or leave the UK. This is called the curtailment period.
I panicked when the email came in. I was already grieving the job loss, and now immigration uncertainty loomed.
I began planning for three futures: find a new UK sponsor, relocate to another country, or return to Rwanda. I started browsing flats in Kigali and Lagos while sending out applications to UK companies. I interviewed at seven companies. Six rejected me outright—they didn’t offer to continue my visa sponsorship. Only one was open to discussing it.
Eventually, I applied to a fintech company I admired. I connected with a recruiter and rushed through the interview process. Fortunately, the company agreed to sponsor me. Due to the fact that it was a visa transfer, and not a fresh application, the process was quicker.
That was how I survived the 60-day countdown. But it took a toll on me.
Curtailment comes with a heavy emotional burden
There is no soft landing when a curtailment notice arrives. The message from the UK Home Office is coldly detached; for them, it’s business as usual. But for the migrant on the receiving end, the emotional weight is heavy.
Curtailment periods bring a sense of unadulterated dread—of losing a place to live, of disrupting fragile progress, of being told that years of effort might soon amount to nothing.
There is crippling uncertainty, too. Migrants know what comes next, but not how to get through it.
Faced with the curtailment notice, only three paths typically lie ahead for African migrants.
The first option is to find a new sponsor. That means finding a company that is not only hiring, but also licensed and ready to take on the responsibility of sponsoring a Skilled Worker visa. In the UK, only 134,901 companies—about 3% of the nearly 5.5 million registered companies in the country—are authorised to sponsor foreign workers on temporary work, Skilled Worker, or Global Mobility visas.
For a migrant looking for sponsorship, this drastically reduces the pool of employers they’re even willing to consider. Even when a migrant is making headway on a job application with one of the few authorised employers, these companies could lose interest the moment visa sponsorship is mentioned, according to another digital nomad who spoke to . It simply means more paperwork.
Employers must prove why the role is essential, confirm that it cannot easily be filled by local talent, and then formally request permission to sponsor. Some companies find the process for getting approval for Certificate of Sponsorship (COS) issuance tedious. Not many are willing to take that on.
Beyond the paperwork, the problem could be that the employer has already filled the number of sponsorship slots it is authorised to offer for the year. Or it could be that the employer simply cannot afford to pay the new salary threshold required for visa sponsorship: £41,700 ($49,000) for most Skilled Worker roles (up from £38,700 as of July 22), while health and care jobs remain at £25,600 ($30,000). These thresholds mean that after tax deductions, those are the least amounts skilled workers must take home. It is also possible that the company has simply exhausted its budget for sponsoring new visa applicants.
As a result, even the most qualified candidates are often overlooked, not because they lack skill, but because of the cost and complexity of sponsorship.
The second option is to switch to a different visa route. But that comes with its own set of challenges. Some migrants who work in tech may qualify for a Global Talent visa if they can prove exceptional ability. Others might consider a Graduate visa or a Spouse visa, if their partner has British citizenship or a stable immigration status in the UK. Each of these options comes with its own requirements, restrictions, and timelines.
These paths demand careful preparation, eligibility, and often a bit of luck. In reality, they are out of reach for most people caught in the 60-day countdown, due to the length of the processing times.
The third and most painful option is to leave the country. Not just the UK, but the life that has been built there. Migrants on Skilled Worker visas often invest time and resources to reach that point. They leave families to adjust to new systems and settle into unfamiliar cities. Being forced to walk away from that progress is a loss that goes beyond employment. It means starting again, often in a place they thought they had left behind.
It currently takes five years on a Skilled Worker or Health and Care Worker visa to qualify for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) in the UK. ILR is the legal right to live and work in the UK without needing a visa. It represents security, residency permanence, and a future that does not hinge on employer decisions. But that future is fragile.
For example, a migrant could lose their job in year 4 of their UK stay. If they cannot find a new sponsor, all that progress is erased. They return home with nothing to show for the years they spent building a life abroad.
Worse, that five-year path may grow longer. The UK government is considering a proposal to extend the ILR timeline to ten years. If that happens, the stakes get even higher.
What it means to stay, and what it takes to plan
Skilled Worker visa holders are vulnerable to disruptions. After years of work, system integration, and tax contributions, their future could be undone by a single corporate decision.
The precarity makes it difficult to plan a future. The idea of settling down, building a future, or even staying put starts to feel risky. Many African professionals left developing economies for the UK. But a curtailment notice could throw everything off-balance.
Migrants on Skilled Worker visas, skilled as they come, remain some of the most precariously placed residents in the UK. Their competence on the job typically carries them through the five-year period to ILR. But as an added layer of caution, it pays for migrants to be on their best behaviour, according to one digital nomad who asked to remain anonymous.
Some sponsoring companies are starting to recognise the emotional toll that comes with sudden layoffs. In a few cases, especially in industries hit hard by economic downturns, migrants are being given advance notice when workforce reductions are on the horizon.
While that warning does not soften the emotional blow, it gives migrants a sliver of time to plan, offering them a chance to prepare for what comes next.
* The names of the individuals featured in this story and where they work have been kept anonymous to maintain privacy.
Mark your calendars! Moonshot by is back in Lagos on October 15–16! Join Africa’s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off—don’t snooze! moonshot..com
