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How UK tech firms can reduce risk amid reforms to immigration | Computer Weekly

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How UK tech firms can reduce risk amid reforms to immigration | Computer Weekly


The IT sector relies on immigration and global mobility to address skills shortages, drive innovation, and support business growth. Global mobility has facilitated leadership development and knowledge transfer, helping companies meet evolving business needs. Recent changes to UK immigration policy threaten to disrupt this flow of talent.

The Immigration Quarterly Statistics highlight this impact. In the year ending March 2024, 67,703 Skilled Worker visas were granted, but the number issued to IT professionals fell by 25% compared to the previous year. By June 2025, 10,231 such visas had been issued —a decline of around 23% year-on-year. Employers are increasingly asking why this is happening and what can be done.

The Skilled Worker route has undergone significant changes in the past 18 months. In April 2024, the minimum salary increased from £26,200 to £38,700, and “going rates” for specific occupations were revised to median salaries rather than the 25th percentile. On 22 July 2025, thresholds rose again to £41,700, and only jobs at degree level (RQF Level 6) or above generally qualify. Calculating the correct salary, especially for those switching from Student or Graduate Visas, has become far more complex.

High sponsorship costs and increased government compliance further discourage employers. Some employers have advised that, because of last years’ higher minimum salary required under the Skilled Worker visa, the cost of transitioning student or graduate visa holders to Skilled Worker status could increase by at least 50%.  An assessment of tech startup workers indicated that 37% would not meet those new salary requirements.

Meanwhile, other countries are actively attracting IT talent. The EU Blue Card allows highly skilled non-EU workers to live and settle in member states. Germany issued 78% of the 89,000 Blue Cards in 2023 and set their 2025 IT salary threshold at €43,760. Canada prioritizes tech and AI skills, while Singapore offers competitive visas targeting similar global talent. Spain issued 28,000 Digital Nomad Visas in 2024, requiring a minimum monthly income of €2,700 and remote employment, with Cyprus providing both this, multiple other visa options and potential income tax incentives for tech workers.

Tips for UK employers

Despite tighter migration policies, there are ways for UK employers to help those seeking new or renewed sponsorship. Clear communication with existing and prospective employees is essential to prevent misinformation. HR teams should provide timely, accurate updates on immigration changes, countering hostile, or misleading media coverage. Recruiters must carefully consider future sponsorship possibilities, likely to be limited to degree-level roles, with calculation of the precise salary thresholds before making offers being critical. Alternative immigration routes, including the Youth Mobility Scheme and Global Talent programme, can also support international recruitment.

 Finally, employers unable to recruit due to these changes should make the impact clear to industry representatives and government bodies. Highlighting the effects of higher salary thresholds and stricter skill requirements can influence Government policy, particularly when combined with public awareness.

The 2024–2025 changes tighten access to sponsorship. Adapting to these changes may determine whether the UK remains a competitive destination for global IT talent.

 Simon Kenny is Immigration and Global Mobility Partner at Spencer West LLP



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6 Great After-Christmas Deals to Spend Your Gift Cards On

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6 Great After-Christmas Deals to Spend Your Gift Cards On


After-Christmas deals are an excellent way to redeem any gift cards or cash you got for Christmas. You can purchase something you actually want, and you can do it for less money than usual. I’ve scoured the Internet for truly good after-Christmas deals on the gear that we’ve hand-tested on the WIRED Reviews team. Many of these sales will end this weekend, so keep that in mind while you’re shopping. Find all the highlights below.

For more inspiration, check out some of our recently updated buying guides, including the Best Office Chairs, the Best Cheap Phones, and the Best Space Heaters.

WIRED Featured Deals:

Anker Laptop Power Bank for $88 ($47 off)

We love this beefy power bank. Its 25,000-mAh capacity is more than enough for fully charging your iPhone between 4 and 6 times, and it can deliver up to 165 watts to two devices meaning that you can charge your laptop, gaming console, or anything else you fancy. The built-in USB-C cable doubles as a carrying loop. There’s also a nifty display that’ll give you at-a-glance information on remaining battery, temperature, charging speeds, and more. It has pass-through charging support and only takes about two hours to fully recharge. This deal price matches what we saw on Black Friday.

Google Pixel 10 for $599 ($200 off)

  • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

  • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

  • Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Google

Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL

There was an on-page coupon (PIXEL10) that had the best price we’ve tracked for any of the phones in the Google Pixel 10 lineup. That coupon is not available as of Saturday morning, but it may be back—clip it if you see it. This is still a good deal on the smartest Android phones you can buy, with fantastic cameras, snappy processors, gorgeous displays, and more AI integration than the average person needs. Check out our dedicated buying guide to figure out which Google Pixel 10 is right for you. If you’re in the market for an upgrade, now is a good time to buy considering that we’ve never seen any phone in this flagship lineup sell for less.

Bruvi BV-01 Brewer Bundle for $228 ($120 off)—Clip the Coupon

Image may contain: Cup, Box, Beverage, Coffee, and Coffee Cup

Photograph: Louryn Strampe

I’ve tested a lot of pod coffee makers, and the Bruvi BV-01 is my favorite. This deal price is the best we see outside of special events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The brewer is cute and looks great on a counter, with a large reservoir, an intuitive touchscreen display, and a built-in wastebin that collects used pods for you. The best part are the proprietary B-Pods, which are designed to biodegrade in a landfill. The bundle gets you the machine plus an assortment of bestselling coffee and espresso pods to get you started.

Fitbit Charge 6 for $100 ($60 off)

Fitbit Charge 6

The Fitbit Charge 6 has been at the top of our fitness tracker buying guide since we first tested it. It’s attractive, affordable, accessible, and on sale for a match of the best deal we’ve seen. It’ll play well with iOS and Android, and it has a solid suite of features that’ll cover almost anyone’s needs—including skin temperature, heart rate readings, ECGs, activity and workout tracking, and more. The battery lasts for at least a week on a single charge. This deal comes with a six-month subscription to Fitbit Premium, which normally costs $10 per month.

Hydro Flask Standard Mouth Water Bottle for $30 ($10 off)

Hydroflask Bottle

Photograph: Dick’s Sporting Goods 

Hydro Flask

Standard Mouth Water Bottle

This budget-friendly deal gets you a steal on the best reusable water bottle. Hydro Flask bottles are durable, portable, and easy to cover in all the stickers you’ve been hoarding. The handle is flexible, the bottle is leakproof, and every component is dishwasher safe (though you may want to opt for hand-washing if you do end up plastering it in stickers). A few different colors are on sale at this price.

Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 for $200 ($50 off)

Left: Selfie of a person with short hair wearing Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 earbuds in orange. Right: curved, around-the-ear earbuds and an oval-shaped case.

If hitting the gym is one of your New Year’s resolutions for 2026, the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 are worth considering. They’re the best workout headphones we’ve tested thanks to their comfortable and ergonomic fit, noise cancelation, spatial audio, a heart rate monitor, and the fact that they play well with both iOS and Android phones. The sound is solid, the battery life is good, and they’re water-resistant. This deal price comes within $20 of the best we’ve seen. Every color—orange, lavender, grey, and black—is on sale.


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Hyperkin’s Competitor Upgrades the Xbox Controller by Copying Sony’s Design

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Hyperkin’s Competitor Upgrades the Xbox Controller by Copying Sony’s Design


The most immediately striking difference is that Hyperkin’s product swaps the typical Xbox approach of asymmetric thumbsticks for the PlayStation’s horizontal layout. It also separates the D-pad (it’s one piece inside the pad, but splits its cardinal directions so each appears to be its own button), while the ABXY face buttons are spaced slightly further apart. Where the DualSense’s touchpad would sit, we have the Xbox home, menu, view, and share buttons, all blended in rather smartly. An LED ring around the home button just about echoes the lights running the periphery of the DualSense’s touchpad, although it’s really more of an inversion of the regular Xbox controller, where the home button itself lights up.

The Competitor’s thumbsticks come equipped with thumbcaps that mirror the PS5’s, an outer ring with a convex central point, but a pair of Xbox-standard concave caps are included. These easily pop on and off, and can be mixed and matched, if you were so (strangely) inclined.

There are two areas where this departs from both the standard Xbox and PlayStation controllers in terms of inputs. The first is the presence of two programmable rear buttons, M1 and M2. By default, these duplicate the input of the A and B buttons, but holding down the Mode button between them lets you remap them. There are also physical button locks to prevent their use entirely. The other is that while the Competitor boasts a 3.5-mm headphone jack like Microsoft’s official pad, it adds a built-in audio mute button, hidden in the black between the thumbsticks—a nice little upgrade.

Oddly Familiar

In use, the Competitor feels … well, a lot like a PS5 pad. The slightly wider grip fits in the hand comfortably, all inputs are accessible, and those symmetrical thumbsticks sit nicely in reach for all but the smallest hands. A microtextured underside provides a solid grip that, when coupled with its 232-gram weight, makes the Competitor feel particularly suited to longer play periods. It’s all very familiar if you’re already a multiformat gamer, to the extent that it sometimes slightly threw my muscle memory off, reaching a thumb out to do a PlayStation touchpad function and finding only the Xbox system buttons.

Photograph: Matt Kamen



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In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom

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In Cryptoland, Memecoin Fever Gives Way to a Stablecoin Boom


When US president Donald Trump launched his own meme cryptocurrency on January 17, days before his return to the White House, I was halfway up a Swiss alp, attending a crypto conference in the town of St. Moritz.

Memecoins, which typically have no purpose beyond financial speculation, were having a moment. The previous year, millions of new memecoins had flooded the market; a few, like Fartcoin, had rocketed to billion-dollar valuations. Pump.Fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins, had become one of the fastest-growing crypto launchpad businesses ever. Now, the soon-to-be president was getting in on the act.

Over lunch on the second day of the conference, beneath the ornate stucco ceiling and golden chandeliers of the venue’s dining hall, I located a table designated for a conversation about memecoins. Whereas other tables were half full, the memecoin workshop was oversubscribed; latecomers pulled up chairs to create two full rows.

The discussion was led by Nagendra Bharatula, founder of investment firm G-20 Group. Bharatula had recently coauthored a paper arguing that memecoins, despite their juvenile spirit, had a place in professional investors’ portfolios. In the six months prior, a basket of 25 “bluechip memecoins”—an oxymoron if ever there was one—had outperformed bitcoin by 150 percent, he pointed out. Some of the attendees murmured their approval.

Since then, the shine has come off the memecoin market. The paper value of Trump’s coin, which climbed to a peak of $14 billion two days after its launch, has cratered to roughly $1 billion. Hundreds of thousands of small investors lost their shirts. Pump.Fun’s daily revenue, a proxy for the overall appetite for memecoin trading, is barely more than a tenth of what it was in January. The memecoin gold rush has spawned a raft of litigation.

Next up: the stablecoin. If memecoins are symbolic of reckless abandon and unflinching profiteering in cryptoland, stablecoins are a symbol of the industry’s search for purpose and respectability. Designed to hold a steady $1 valuation, stablecoins are pitched by proponents as a faster and cheaper way to make everyday payments and international money transfers.

In a year in which the US has declared itself open for crypto business, where previously crypto firms feared regulatory backlash under the Biden administration, stablecoins have supplanted memecoins as the coin à la mode—and punctured the mainstream.

Though stablecoins have been around since 2014, they have predominantly been used by crypto traders as a safe harbor during bouts of market volatility, not by regular people. The concept has also faced resistance from regulators skeptical of a new form of money; Diem, a stablecoin venture incubated at Meta, famously shuttered in 2022 in the face of broad-based opposition.



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