My Eligibility

Hi,

I work in Delhi (India) and have 13 years of experience in IT, started my career in databases/data-warehouses, moved to data science in 2012, right now working on cutting edge technologies designing/building machine learning models for my organization. I write technology articles regularly on LinkedIn & Medium, have a decent following there. I also keep contributing to GitHub (code, presentations etc), I am also a Kaggle Expert (its a world-wide data science competition platform), I am also in process of writing research paper (exciting but not published yet) in data science area.
I am looking for exceptional talent visa and have gone through the process on a high-level and I have following queries:

1. Based on my profile, do I have decent chances to get this visa?
2. I don't know CEOs/CIOs to write recommendation letters for me, people/managers I have worked with are mid to senior level managers in the IT MNCs. Is it fine to get recommendation letters from them?
3. I appreciate if you would like to give some handy advise based on my background and your experience with this visa process?

Thanks in advance.
~missionUK

If I were you, I'd apply under exceptional promise, for the data science part. Emphasise the data science, rather than the IT, and be sure to demonstrate your continual learning. Your Github and your LinkedIn and Medium articles on Data Science can prove continual contribution to the tech community. There's both of your qualifying criteria. And for your key criteria, you can use the cutting-edge machine learning models you use at work as your entreprenurial innovation. Show some snippets of code and explain what it does and, most importantly, why it is important. You can have senior managers write recommendation letters for you.

I have 2.5 years experience in Data Science (no technical experience before that) and I applied through Tech Nation, Exceptional Promise last year. I didn't have CEOs recommend me. One was my boss (not our CEO) and one was a C-level person at a startup.

Thanks for the response @pdl, I read somewhere that if you apply for 'exceptional talent' and if you miss the criterian by inches, you are automatically considered for 'exceptional promise', right?

On the other hand, me being middle aged (35 year old) and still claiming 'exceptional promise' would also hamper chances in some way, isn't it? I mean I believe 'exceptional promise' is for relatively younger talent.

I'm not sure, actually. I'm 30 and did exceptional promise, but I assumed that it to do with what stage you were at in your career.