You can usually only apply for a Global Talent visa if you have successfully applied for an endorsement to prove that you are a leader or potential leader.
You can apply for the visa without an endorsement if you’ve won an eligible award.
I don’t think there’s that’s as much ambiguity here as you’re making out. You can just look up the conditions of the visa. It would be interesting to see a random sample of people who received the visa though.
That wasn’t my understanding of it:
https://www.gov.uk/global-talent
Hmm. There was some noise about an uncapped global scientist thing. Maybe they changed the criteria since.
It says right there on the page it’s for “top scientists”. That’s very different from anyone with a PhD.
That pattern-matches to inflated job marketing talk, which I always mentally downgrade by an order of magnitude. But maybe wrongly here.
I don’t think there’s that’s as much ambiguity here as you’re making out. You can just look up the conditions of the visa. It would be interesting to see a random sample of people who received the visa though.