Business viewpoint: Cosmo Currey, head of talent acquisition at Boston Link, believes the recent changes to the island’s work permit system were essential for the continued health of the local economy.

Here in this special article Cosmo explains why.

Imagine it in tall, bold print on the front page of the Examiner:

EGAMING FIRM TO LEAVE ISLAND.

It’s the nightmare headline that keeps the senior echelons of our Government awake at night.

It’s the headline that presages thousands of jobs lost, ferries to Liverpool full of removal trucks, plummeting home prices, rampant unemployment, and untold millions disappearing from the exchequer.

It would be an economic apocalypse for the island and until recently it seemed inevitable.

Like it or not, technology companies now underpin our economy.

Employers such as Microgaming and The Stars Group account for upwards of 15% of our GDP, and growing.

They are here for many reasons, including our excellent industry governance and, we can whisper it quietly, our domestic tax rate.

They are also already in many other jurisdictions, though, and to believe that the Isle of Man is the only place they could call home is naïve, arrogant, or both.

These companies are growing and, like anything else that grows, they are hungry.

For them, the great hunger is for talent.

If our island cannot feed them specialist staff, then they will go where they can be fed in abundance, taking the non-specialist roles (for which we absolutely do have people) with them.

I am a headhunter; I spend every minute of my working life actively searching for people to fill the roles these companies have open.

If these people were on the island, I guarantee I would have found them.

By making the process of bringing new staff to the island more onerous, it was the work permit regime that threatened to bring about the apocalypse. Many claim the permit process isn’t a challenge when there genuinely isn’t someone qualified locally. As a professional working every day with potential relocations I can tell you unequivocally that isn’t true, for several reasons:

lThe administrative element, however simple, turns candidates off. To attract top talent who will contribute substantially to the island’s economy, we have to seriously ‘sell’ the island. That effort is undermined when they are told about the work permit process – it projects an image of an insular, bureaucratic society.

lWe basically had to rule out anyone with a working cohabiting partner, because their partner wouldn’t have been able to get a job. That’s a lot of people struck off the list instantly.

lThe additional time it takes loses candidates. If an exceptional candidate is looking for a job, you can bet the Isle of Man isn’t their only option. Every day that goes by before you get your employment offer out increases the chances of losing the candidate to a rival jurisdiction, so every day the work permit process adds has the potential to lose us talent and negatively impact the island’s economy

It was therefore with great relief that I learned the Council of Ministers has recently committed to relaxing the work permit restrictions further following the positive response to reforms earlier in the year.

Already simplified fees and application processes, automatic permits for cohabiting partners, the removal of permit requirements for certain visa holders, and a register of exempt persons are helping with the concerns above.

Future changes may help reduce the barriers further.

There will always be those reading this who will assume this process of offering ‘come overs’ work permits will detract from Manx workers.

They would be right, but only if those skills existed on-island, which they don’t.

Nationalists are quick to pipe up that we should be doing more to develop those skills at home.

They are, of course, absolutely correct: we need to completely overhaul our education system to produce graduates with economically useful skills for the digital economy.

Yet even if we achieved all the many sweeping educational reforms required tomorrow, it wouldn’t help our economy for at least five years.

We need these skills today, and only then because yesterday isn’t an option.

If we waited five years, we wouldn’t have the jobs for the newly qualified people, and we would just be exporting graduates.

These changes have averted the apocalypse, at least for now.

As our tech cluster continues to grow the challenge is only set to get greater if we continue to starve our economy of specialist talent.

Perhaps these changes have bought us enough time to balance the ability to import talent with the capacity to generate more at home – but only if the next big change we see is in education.