Kelly Hardman

Those are the practical questions against which the Budget’s ambitions for investment, innovation and international talent should be judged.

There are encouraging signals. But attracting capital and securing the workforce needed to put it to productive use must be considered together. An investment without a credible people plan is not fully investment-ready.

Workforce readiness should therefore become a more explicit part of how Scotland thinks about investment readiness. When competing for a significant project or investment, the questions should not only concern sites, infrastructure, finance and incentives, but whether the required skills exist, can be developed in time or recruited from elsewhere.

Welcome signals, but will Scotland benefit?

The Budget proposes widening the High Potential Individual route to graduates from more leading international universities, alongside two-year Graduate route for graduates of qualifying institutions. It also proposes changes to occupation-specific Skilled Worker salary requirements intended to better reflect labour-market conditions.

Their practical value will depend on the detailed rules and implementation.

For Scotland, the test is whether the changes help businesses recruit the people they need, where they need them and on commercially workable terms.

A broader international talent pool is welcome, but it will not automatically resolve a specialist vacancy at an engineering supplier, a technical shortage affecting a clean-energy project or a recruitment challenge facing a growing life sciences business.

An immigration route being available on paper does not necessarily make a particular hire commercially viable. Eligibility, timing and cost all matter.

From investment announcements to delivery

Scotland’s strengths in energy, technology, life sciences, and advanced manufacturing create significant opportunities. Their success depends on the businesses and supply chains capable of delivering them.

Consider a Scottish engineering company deciding whether to tender for a major energy contract. Its concern may be whether it can assemble the right team before mobilisation without committing significant costs before the work is confirmed. For a growing technology business, one experienced specialist might be essential to developing a product, securing customers, or supporting the next funding round.

In either case, a recruitment gap can constrain revenue, delivery, and growth.

Scotland should not only ask which occupations employers are struggling to fill today, but what capabilities the investments we hope to attract will require in five or ten years. Energy, technology, advanced manufacturing, and other growth sectors can find themselves competing the same engineering, digital and specialist expertise. Today’s workforce planning therefore shapes tomorrow’s investment capacity.

Access to talent should increasingly be regarded as part of Scotland’s economic infrastructure. If a workforce constraint is first identified when a new facility is opening or project mobilising, it has been identified too late.

Develop skills and recruit where necessary

International recruitment must sit alongside sustained investment in Scotland’s existing workforce.

Education, apprenticeships, technical training, reskilling, and greater workforce participation are essential. In the energy sector, helping experienced people transfer their skills into emerging opportunities should be a central priority.

Employers need sufficient visibility of future projects to invest confidently in training and recruitment. But developing specialist expertise takes time. Businesses cannot always postpone a project or investment until the domestic pipeline catches up.

Scotland therefore needs to develop more skills domestically while retaining the ability to recruit internationally where genuine gaps remain. A credible workforce strategy needs both.

Attraction is only part of the challenge

Businesses need not wait for further immigration reform. Workforce planning can begin before investment commitments and delivery schedules are fixed, identifying critical capabilities, recruitment lead times and the full cost of securing the people required.

But employers also need to think beyond recruitment.

The government’s recently confirmed earned settlement framework is an important reminder that attraction is only part of the talent equation. It sets a new ten-year standard qualifying period for settlement, with shorter or longer pathways depending on factors an individual’s contribution, integration and immigration history. Detailed rules and operational guidance are still to follow.

For internationally mobile talent, career opportunities, family circumstances, and confidence in building a long-term future in the UK can influence whether Scotland becomes a temporary destination or a permanent home.

The UK wants to compete effectively for internationally mobile talent while changing the terms on which that talent can build a permanent future here, the interaction between attraction and retention requires careful consideration.

For Scotland, retention is part of economic competitiveness. There is limited value in successfully attracting scarce international expertise if Scotland cannot also create compelling reasons for those people to stay.

Kelly Hardman is a director at Fragomen