Organisations are concerned with the potential impact on their business of the Immigration Law, in particular, the term limits.
This requirement of rolling people over after a seven year term on the Islands is creating trepidation in most businesses. How will this impact our talent pool?
Other stressors to the talent system should also be considered.
How do we better manage our talent cycle of recruitment, hiring, retention and attrition?
Around 50 per cent of the workforce in the Cayman Islands has to be recruited from overseas, creating a huge amount of work for HR managers and recruiting departments. It is getting more difficult to find talent overseas as the increasing cost of living and the Immigration policies are now deterring people from coming to live and work here.
There are some solutions and businesses have to change their mindset and the way they manage this process.
Succession planning has never been more important to a business. The Immigration Law is encouraging businesses to do just that with the Business Staffing plans.
Section 43 of the Immigration Law (2003) requires every business that employs 15 or more work permit holders to have a Business Staffing Plan in place. The initial deadline was 31 December 2004, but due to Hurricane Ivan it was extended to July 2005.
This deadline was again extended and a final deadline is now looming. Every business that is required under this section of the Law must be in compliance by 31 December.
What does this mean for your business?
If you are required to submit a Business Staffing Plan, and fail to do so, you will not be able to get any permits approved after the deadline by the Work Permit Board.
Industries that are hard pressed to deal with this are going to be the ones who have a high level of unskilled labour and little administrative support in the office to pull this together. Putting together a Business Staffing Plan can be fairly simple or rather difficult, depending on the size of your business.
The forms are available on the Immigration website but you have to know your people and your business intimately to put this together. A Business Staffing Plan requires you, as the business owner, to take a hard look at planning. Where do you think you will be in three to five years? How many people do you think you will need over that same period of time? What growth targets are you projecting over this time period? It is a holistic view of your business that forces you to strategically plan your business for the next three to five years; something that many businesses don’t currently do.
The Business Staffing Plan is intended to give the Immigration Department a better handle on the number of work permit holders your business will require and to better manage the work permit process.
In a recent press release, Chairman of the Business Staffing Plan Board Mrs. Sophia Harris stated that the advantage to having a Business Staffing Plan is the time it takes to get work permits approved. She stated that the Work Permit Board takes about three months to get work permits processed but the Business Staffing Plan Board takes about three weeks. In addition, she reminded businesses that once they have reached the requirement level of 15 work permit holders, they had six months to submit a plan.
Submitting the forms to the Business Staffing Plan Board are simply not enough. You need to understand the process and carefully look at the requirements of the Immigration Law. In particular, you need to pay close attention to your recruitment and training programmes in your company.
You will need to show that you are actively seeking to get Caymanians into your business and are training them. This is stipulated under a condition called Regulation 6, which states:
‘The Board may require an applicant for the grant or renewal of a work permit to provide details of any programme that he has that is designed to ensure that Caymanians are provided with the instructions and practical experience necessary to make them fully qualified to carry out the job concerned satisfactorily and as expeditiously as possible.
The absence of such a programme or the failure to implement such a programme without reasonable cause constitutes a ground for denying the grant or renewal of a work permit.’
It may be prudent to identify several of your work permit holder positions and stipulate the Reg 6 to them.
One final takeaway, once you have sent in your plan to the Business Staffing Plan Board and receive the approved plan back, please review it thoroughly to make sure that the Board did not add additional restrictions that you were not expecting.
Once you have signed and agreed to this plan, you will have to live with it for three to five years. You can make amendments in terms of adding positions but the conditions attached to your plan will be set once you have agreed to the final plan that the Board has given you.
Karie Bergstrom is a Senior Manager in the Deloitte Human Capital Consulting Department. She is an accomplished Human Resources professional with significant experience in HR consulting, career development, training and recruitment. Her experience incorporates international exposure in various business sectors including public sector, tourism, financial services industry and manufacturing. She is a member of the Cayman Islands Society of Human Resources Professionals, the Society of Human Resources Management and the American Society for Training & Development.
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