Highly qualified professional: keys to the residence permit

Although the legislation on foreigners in Spain offers several options for obtaining a residence and work permit as a highly qualified professional, in practice few authorizations are granted in this way. The reason, however, is that in most cases the requests are poorly prepared. Here we clarify the main doubts about this aspect.

Highly qualified professional: two different regimes

The first thing you have to be clear about is that there is no single concept of a highly qualified professional, and that there are also two very different procedures to obtain a work and residence permit based on these assumptions.

Thus, there is the regime of the Aliens Act and its regulations, which we can call the general regime, according to which a highly qualified professional is one who will perform a work activity for which higher education qualification is required. In other words, that has a university degree that the law requires indispensable to exercise, as would be the case of a doctor or a lawyer, for example.

On the other hand, there is the system of so-called Law 14/2013, to support Entrepreneurs, which defines the highly qualified professional within several categories. One is that of managerial personnel (of large companies, of small or medium-sized companies considered strategic, or of companies with a project that generates employment or is innovative). Other that of graduates, postgraduates of universities and business schools of recognized prestige.

Highly qualified professional: requirements and procedures

With this in mind, we have to add that each of the regimes has different requirements and procedures. The general regime is stricter, and requires that the remuneration paid to the highly qualified professional be significantly higher than the average. In addition, it is processed as a normal application, and requires checking the national employment situation.

On the contrary, the regime of the Entrepreneurs Act looks simpler, in the sense that it would be enough, in principle, for the beneficiary to be a graduate or post-graduate university student. It is processed by a more expeditious procedure before the Large Companies Unit of the Ministry of Labor. It does not require verification of the national employment situation.

However, in practice the officials in charge of solving these cases are applying criteria of the general regime, which complicates things. For this reason, it is essential that when you consider applying for a work and residence permit as a highly qualified professional, you will be advised by a specialist lawyer to avoid rejection of the application.