If you currently have a Critical Skills visa and want to obtain a Permanent Residence permit to live in South Africa, you should already know that one of the requirements is to write a letter of motivation.
In this post I’ll explain to you how to write a convincing letter, will give you a template that indicates the parts to structure it and will give you an example so you have a better idea and create your astounding letter.
Steps
If you are considering to move to South Africa with a Critical Skills visa and then apply for a Permanent Residence I will recommend you to read the following successful cases obtaining those documents:
On the South African Department of Home Affairs official website, you can find the complete list of documents required to process your Permanent Residence permit with a Critical Skills Visa. One of the documents is the next one:
“A letter of motivation indicating the critical skills possessed by the applicant will be to the benefit of the South African environment in which he/she intends to operate and which relates to the critical skill in question”
In other words, the Department of Home Affairs wants you to explain how will your critical skill benefit South Africa – as simple as that. But yeah I can understand you may be thinking, how can I start?
Now that we have understood the task, we can see that writing a Letter of Motivation to obtain a Permanent Residence permit is very similar to a Cover Letter to obtain a job position.
But in this case, instead of convincing the employer that you are the best candidate to make the company grow, you are convincing the government of South Africa that you are the best candidate to make the country grow.
So my advice is that if your Critical Skill is related to a former job position that you have had in the past and you previously wrote a Cover Letter for that job; you can reuse it or at least copy-paste some parts of it.
Also, keep in mind that another document required by the Department of Home affairs is a “comprehensive curriculum vitae” so this letter will allow you to cover qualifications you can’t fully explain in your curriculum.
You can follow the next structure to write your letter of motivation. However, feel free to make any changes according to what you consider is more important.
b. Reason for writing
c. Introducing yourself
d. How will you benefit South Africa
e. Closing and signature
In the official website of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) there is a description of the tasks performed by a person holding a specific qualification. You can read it to make sure you mention all the tasks that you can do.
For example, you can read HERE the description for a person holding a qualification in Business Analysis.
Describe your abilities in terms of how your experiences will benefit not only the organization in which you are going to work but the whole country.
Include evidence that you have you’re your research and know the country’s needs and current situation.
Remember that your whole application is comprised of a lot of documents and the Home Affairs officers don’t have a lot of time to read each Letter of Motivation.
Department of Home Affairs
Republic of South Africa
To Whom It May Concern,
I am writing to express my interest in obtaining a Permanent Residence permit to live in South Africa. After getting to know the culture, traditions, and people of this country I want to live here and see this country grow and prosper. My goal is to use my skills as a Business Analyst to help the financial sector flourish.
I graduated from ABC University with a degree in Finance and you can see in my curriculum that I worked at DEF Bank in New York and GHI Consulting Firm in Miami. Therefore, I have vast work experience in financial analysis and system implementation.
At present, I am working at JKL Bank in Johannesburg where I am responsible for the implementation of a new system that simplifies the data collection of new SMEs looking for loans and analyses it to generate insights that will help the bank on the selection and monitoring of clients. I am implementing a system that I used to operate before at DEF Bank in New York. Currently, I’m the only one in the company who possess this knowledge.
Fortunately, the implementation of this system increases the cases of SMEs obtaining loans and succeeding; and after analyzing the key economic indicators of South Africa I found out that the SMEs contribute to approximately AA% of the GDP. I strongly believe that supporting this sector has a lot of potential to drive the economy’s growth.
Thank you for taking the time to consider my application.
