The proposals come from the Migration Advisory Committee, which reviewed how salary thresholds apply under the Skilled Worker visa route and related immigration pathways.

The recommendations are not yet policy and will only take effect if approved by the UK government.

At the centre of the review is a change to how minimum pay levels are set for specific jobs. The committee proposes shifting occupation-specific salary thresholds from the current median earnings benchmark to the 25th percentile.

In practical terms, this would reduce the minimum salary many employers must offer to sponsor foreign workers.

The overall salary requirement would remain in place. The MAC suggests keeping the general threshold at £41,700, while also presenting a higher option of £48,400 for consideration by policymakers.

A separate proposal introduces a lower entry point for new applicants. Under this plan, younger professionals and recent graduates would qualify under a single salary threshold of £33,400. The aim is to make early-career recruitment easier for employers struggling to fill roles.

The committee also recommends scrapping existing salary discounts for PhD holders. Where postdoctoral concessions are still deemed necessary, it suggests a capped threshold of £41,700, applied for no more than four years.

The changes go beyond the Skilled Worker route. For the Global Business Mobility system, the MAC proposes aligning salary requirements for Senior or Specialist Workers and UK Expansion Workers with median pay levels in each occupation.

Graduate Trainees would also fall under the £33,400 threshold, with occupation-based variations removed entirely.

For roles on the Temporary Shortage List, the committee sets out a minimum salary level of £30,900. Employers would still be expected to pay market-aligned wages, even where immigration support is allowed for shortage occupations.

The recommendations are closely tied to ongoing labour shortages in the UK. Employers in healthcare, information technology, engineering, construction, and education report difficulties in recruiting staff.

Lower thresholds could expand access to overseas candidates, including professionals from countries such as Nigeria and India, where demand for UK work routes is strong.

Nothing changes immediately. The UK government still has to decide whether to adopt the proposals through the UK Home Office.

Alongside the salary review, visa costs in the UK have also been increasing. Short-term visit visas of up to six months now cost £135, up from £127.

Longer-term options have also increased, with two-year visas at £506, five-year visas at £903, and ten-year visas at £1,128. The adjustments cover several categories, including study, transit, and family routes.

The programme is expected to begin on Wednesday and comes as demand for digital infrastructure increases across Africa.

Growth in cloud services, artificial intelligence workloads and enterprise data storage has increased requirements on operators to find engineers who can run critical systems.

Experts in the sector say new facilities are opening, but skilled workers remain in short supply.

“There’s a lot of recycling of the same people across companies,” said Adebola Adefarati, Rack Centre’s head of marketing and communications. “People move from one data centre or telco to another, and it becomes a closed loop. The industry has to start creating new talent.”

Rack Centre said many operators still depend on internal training because experienced workers are limited. The problem is bigger in Africa, where specialised training is scarce and trained staff are usually hired away by foreign firms.

According to the company, engineers who can manage infrastructure in Nigeria are especially attractive abroad because they already understand how to work under difficult conditions such as unstable grid power and high temperatures.

“Once people gain experience running reliable systems in Nigeria, they become prime targets,” Adefarati said. “We’ve seen a number of our own people leave for opportunities abroad.”

Rather than compete for the same workers, Rack Centre said it wants to help build a larger talent pipeline for the industry.

Data centres usually run with small teams, but those teams need specialised knowledge. Staff must manage power systems, cooling equipment, network hardware, monitoring tools and emergency response systems around the clock.

The first group will take in between 15 and 20 trainees. Rack Centre said only some may join the company after graduation, while others could move into jobs with telecom firms and other data centre operators.

Participants will receive classroom training, technical certifications and practical experience inside a live operating facility. One certification track will be delivered with Schneider Electric’s training platform. The full programme will run for about four to five months.

Rack Centre said it will fully cover the estimated $2,500 cost per participant.

“The issue is not that people aren’t studying engineering,” Adefarati said. “It’s that they’re not trained to work on systems that must run 100% of the time. Data centres are different. You’re dealing with redundant power, precision cooling, and real-time fault detection in a highly sensitive environment.”

The company said operating in Nigeria brings added pressure. Cooling systems must work efficiently in extreme heat, while power infrastructure must cope with an unreliable national grid.

Rack Centre is also developing the programme with the Africa Data Centres Association, which is working towards training up to 1,000 professionals over the next two years.

The initiative also aims to improve gender balance in the sector. Women are still underrepresented in many technical operations roles, and Rack Centre said it wants at least one-third of each cohort to be female.

“Data centres are often seen as hardware,” Adefarati said. “But their success is fundamentally about people.”