Want to learn how to get a Talent visa in the US. Check out this video and practice your English speaking along the way.
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Video Transcript:
Getting a visa to study or to work in the US can be a really confusing process. I recently sat down with entrepreneur and author Soundarya Balasubramani who has gotten no less than 6 visas to work and study in the US.
She shared some valuable information I want to share with you now about getting a talent visa to the US. Soundarya can make clear for you the best visa to get and how to get it.
I’m Rachel, and I’ve been teaching English and the American Accent on Youtube for over 15 years. Check out my free course, the top 3 ways to master the American accent by visiting RachelsEnglish.com/free.
I’m so glad to be introducing you all to Soundarya. She is an author and founder of Unshackled.club, a community providing support and resources to individuals navigating the talent visa process.
First, what is the difference between an H1-B and an O1-A talent visa? She recently explained in a webinar that she did for my students.
And that’s why you should care about talent because the O-1A which you see seeing on the screen here it doesn’t have a lottery. It doesn’t require you to go through a process where you have to pray that your name gets there. So, that’s the very first difference between the H-1B and the 0-1A. They’re both work visas, they’re both temporary visas, but these are the differences.
A few more differences are on an H-1B, you have to make a minimum salary. What this means is someone asked me is the H-1B for skilled workers. It is for skilled workers, um, a lot of people in Tech apply for the H-1B for example, and the employer has to pay a certain minimum salary when you’re on an H-1B.
On the O-1A, you don’t need to make a minimum wage and this is great for founders because founders don’t want to take salary out of their company.
Third difference is that the H-1B, you can only file during March of each year. But the O-1A can be filed anytime from anywhere. You can also file the H-1B from anywhere um, to be clear but the O-1 can be filed at any point during the year. There’s no restriction.
Finally, fourth, H-1B, you have to have a direct relationship between your job and the degree. What this means is if you had a degree in say computer science. Your job cannot be a life coach or your job cannot be an artist. There has to be a direct relationship.
On the O-1A you don’t need to have a direct relationship. Y ou can switch fields. But the O-1 does require you to have other things which we’ll talk about. H-1B can only be extended to six years. O-1 has no limitation. So, if you get it once, you can renew it unlimited number of times.
Last point is that the H-1B, you have to wait till October. So even if you get shows in the lottery, you have to wait till October for it to be effective.
But the O-1A is immediate. If you get an approval from today, you’re effectively on the O-1 if you apply through that process.
Now um, someone asked, Lala asked do you need to be employed for filing O-1A?
Yes. They’re both work Visas so you need a sponsor. You can have an agent be a sponsor for you on the O-1. An agent can be an individual not a company necessarily but they both require you to have a sponsor.
Soundarya, I know that in your community a lot of people have gotten O-1A. How easy is it if you’re not currently employed to find a sponsor like what you mentioned? Is that a pretty rare road to take?
This is where I think I need to talk more about the O-1 first because while the O-1 has all these amazing qualities that you’re seeing on the screen, it’s meant for people who are at the top of their fields. So it’s not easy to get. I mean the US introduced the O-1 back in 1990 because they wanted talented people from across the world to come to America.
Let’s jump ahead to that criteria. How do you know if you can apply for an O1-A visa?
We talked a lot about why the O-1 and E-1 are awesome visas. But the catch is they’re meant for people once again who are experts in their field. And the way US decides you’re an expert is through something called the Eight Pillars. This is also a page from Unshackled but I thought it’ll be a very good summary of what the Eight Pillars are. When you don’t have obvious International Acclaim such as a Nobel Prize or Olympic medal which you know, most of or none of us really have USCIS measures your extraordinary ability by checking if you meet three out of eight criteria. They still need some way to see why do you think you’re awesome in your field and that’s where they came up with these eight criteria just to set the expectation they wrote this this criteria in 1990. 34 years ago, they wrote down this criteria. That’s why some of the things would make no sense today but just understand that they have evolved with the times a little bit, not by a lot but the reason some of the criteria may seem just not relevant to you is because it was written many, many, many years ago.
So there’s eight criteria just because the height of this pillar is top higher than this doesn’t mean this criteria is more important. Don’t think of it that way. We just did that for it to look nice. If you meet any three criteria of the eight, you have a shot at getting the O-1A or the EB-1A. O-1 and EB-1 have the same criteria essentially.
Unshackled is Soundarya’s book that she wrote to explain everything about getting a talent visa to the US, and you can get your own copy by following the link in the video description.
What’s your current job role? Can you guys just write down what is your job role? What’s your area of specialty like are you a software engineer? Product manager? Artist? Just write down what you currently do.
Okay, a lot of software Engineers which is good to know actually. Actor, very interesting. Journalist, professor, engineer, engineer, engineer, engineer. Here’s the good news. I think a lot of the O-1 criteria applies to people in Tech, engineering. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply to the rest of you who’s an actor and architects and teachers, it definitely applies to you as well.
Let’s assume that you, I’m just going to take a software engineer for example. Let’s also assume that you work at a company where you play kind of an important role. If you do that, then you probably satisfy the number eight over here that says critical capacity. So, critical capacity essentially means you play an important role in a company that is reasonably distinguished. So, let’s take for example um, Airbnb. You’re a software engineer at Airbnb and you worked on a feature or a product that helped increase the revenue for the company by several million dollars. I’m just giving an example. If you can get a letter from your manager stating this in word, then it might help you in satisfying number eight, critical capacity.
Now, let’s also assume that you get paid a pretty good salary at your company. Number six, high salary essentially means you are paid in the top 20-25% of people in your job role and in your location.
If you’re in Colombia and in Colombia you’re in a very specific city. Go and check what is the average salary that a software engineer gets paid in that city. And if you can show that you’re in the top 20%, 10%, then you can say that, hey, I’m getting paid a high salary.
Another common example I see for software Engineers is number three, Judging. So, number three: Judging.
Judging essentially means as an engineer, you have judged the work of other people other engineers in your field. So, let’s say that you went to a hackathon and you were one of the five judges. If you can get a letter or even an email that says you were invited as a judge you can show that as evidence.
And I’ll talk about just maybe one more. Number five, Authorship. Authorship is about you showing that I have published articles or papers or books in my field and it went through an editorial process. For a software engineer, this could mean publishing an article in a famous cyber security blog, if you’re a cyber security engineer. If you can just show that my article went through some process before it got published, then you could show that as evidence of authorship.
So, like this, there’s eight criteria and you have to show evidence for at least three of the eight criteria. Ideally, people show evidence for at least five just because you want to, you know, build a very strong profile in front of the officer, but you have to at least show three, that’s the bare minimum. I can go through the other criterias but honestly, what I would love for you all to do is to go and read about this in more depth after the call. Like go Google O-1A criteria and read about what each of the criteria mean.
There, you heard me mention a student Scholarship. This is for students who want to join Unshackled.club to work towards getting their own talent visa. If you go to RachelsEnglish.com/visa and scroll down a bit, you’ll find a section on how to apply for the student scholarship. At rachelsenglish.com/visa you can also learn more about Unshackled.club, the community that Soundarya founded, which includes lawyers and people who have already been successful in getting their talent visas.
Thank you so much for watching and learning with me. Don’t forget to visit RachelsEnglish.com/free for my free course on the American accent that will give you some real training to sound more natural speaking American English. Keep your learning going now with this video and don’t forget to subscribe with notifications on, I love being your English teacher. That’s it and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.
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