It’s been exactly 2 years since I joined my regional role in Boehringer Ingelheim in Dubai. I rarely blog about my personal life, but I thought now would be a good time to share some of the experiences around this move.
The move to Dubai was in itself fairly straight forward as it was through an internal move. I started off with a regular employment based residence visa valid for 2 years. My family also relocated in the middle of last year, and their visas were completed through the office pretty quickly.
Since my visa was due for renewal this year, I decided to opt for the UAE Golden Visa for salaried professionals which has a relatively easier qualification qualification criteria than the others:
- Monthly gross salary of AED 30,000 or higher (that seems to be the current consensus, as I have also read of it being the basic salary without allowances in the past)
- Bachelor’s degree or higher
- Getting the equivalency certificate for this is typically the most time consuming process
While my application was managed by my office in DIFC which definitely helped with the clarity around the process, I did find this recent Reddit post by the Amer Centre quite helpful and along with this article in Khaleej Times that explains the process and documentation requirements. I am sharing a simple guide to get the necessary documents ready based on my experience.
Step by step guide
The overall process took about 2 months for me, out of which the first 3 weeks went in getting the degree equivalency certificate, followed by 2 weeks for the degree physical attestation and about 2 weeks for the actual visa application, health checkup & Emirates ID issuance.
You need digitized versions of the following key documents for the application (some like the equivalency certificate require additional documents for the verification) in addition to other documents from your employer:
- Degree equivalency certificate
- Bank statement showing the salary credit each month
- Attested degree certificate (UAE Embassy in university country and MOFA in UAE)
- NOC from company
- Current passport and visa
- Current passport sized photo (white background, no glasses – you can tell the photo studio for the Emirates ID or visa version)
The equivalency certificate
Getting the degree equivalency certificate is usually the bottleneck in this process, based on the experience of my colleagues and those who have shared their experience online.
The process is as below with details on the Ministry site here (they also have a useful document checklist that you can refer to):
Typically you would need your original degree certificate, the final transcript (official stamped marksheet for the entire duration of the course) and your passport copy. You need to choose one of the official partners (Dataflow or Quadrabay at the moment) for the verification and share these documents with them. It costs around AED 350 for this part of the process.
The turnaround time is slated to be 30 days, but is completely dependent on the response time of the university. Here are a couple of tips to help speed up the process which worked for me:
- Keep the details of your university alumni association and key academic departments handy.
- Once the initial documents have been verified by the partner and sent to the university, if you do not get any update within a couple of weeks check in with the customer support for details regarding the communication with the university.
- I managed to get the details of the email subject line and the department to which they had mailed this way.
- Contact the alumni association or academic department with the details you got regarding the verification communication to nudge it along.
Once the verification process is successfully completed, you will get the notification to complete the application on the Ministry site with the appropriate link. There is another payment involved, and the certificate is generated almost immediately. This completes the most time consuming part of the application.
Degree attestation and next steps
The next few steps are quite straight forward, and you could even get the degree attestation done while you are waiting for the verification to happen. You will of course need the physical degree certificate for this, and use an agency like VFS (they have an attestation helpline that you can mail here) to get this done in 2-3 weeks with doorstep pickup and drop-off.
Once you have these documents you can go ahead with the actual visa application. A few additional tips:
- In the bank statement (an online statement download should be fine), highlight the salary deposits and make sure that your name & account details are there on every page & highlight those as well.
- If you are immediately transferring your salary to another account after the deposit, you may need to provide the statement from the other account as well.
- The photo you submit will be used in the visa and Emirates ID, so you can ask the photo studio to take it accordingly.
- You will probably be given a slot for the health checkup, but depending on your location you may be able to walk in for the checkup much earlier.
- Ensure that you are setup on UAE pass so that the authentication on the partner sites is easier.
- Setup your ICP app as well do that you can access the digital versions of your visa and updated Emirates ID. This uses UAE pass as well for login.
- Depending on how you have applied, you may need to get the new Emirates ID re-issued.
- You will need to transfer your dependents’ visas at some point in time as well.
Hope this helped you, and wish you the best with your Golden Visa application! If this gets a good response, I’ll share some of my experiences and learnings around the Dubai relocation.