Submitting your university diploma for a skilled worker or employment visa application in the United Kingdom requires more than a notarized photocopy. Receiving authorities in the United Kingdom verify documents through an internationally agreed apostille procedure that ties your original record to a recognized state authority in the country of issuance. The order in which the steps are performed matters: a translation completed before the apostille is added is usually rejected, and missing the prior state-level authentication is the single most common reason the United Kingdom returns documents unprocessed.
Documents bound for the United Kingdom are authenticated through the FCDO Legalisation Office in Milton Keynes, which issues Hague Apostilles for documents originating in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Because both the United Kingdom and most likely the country where the document was issued are members of the 1961 Hague Apostille Convention, a single apostille certificate is sufficient — no embassy legalization is needed.
No. The entire apostille chain is processed in the country where your university diploma was issued, not in the United Kingdom. You only need to ship the original document to our processing office; the apostilled and translated package is then couriered to wherever you are.
Yes. The apostille we issue is performed by the FCDO Legalisation Office in Milton Keynes, which issues Hague Apostilles for documents originating in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the recognized authority for documents of this type. Receiving institutions in the United Kingdom — embassies, consulates, employers and immigration offices — verify the document through the same channel.
If your diploma is not in one of the United Kingdom's working languages, a sworn translation is normally required in addition to the apostille. We can add a certified translation as part of the same order.
Three issues account for most rejections: (1) the apostille is missing or was issued by a non-competent authority; (2) the translation was completed by a translator not recognized in the United Kingdom; (3) the order of operations was wrong — for example, a translation produced before the apostille was added, leaving the apostille text untranslated. We sequence the chain correctly the first time.
Employers and skilled-worker visa officers in the United Kingdom sit on dozens of applications per week. A document chain that arrives correctly authenticated and translated the first time moves through the queue faster, while a chain with a missing step is set aside and often only flagged after weeks of waiting. We process your university diploma so that the work-visa decision-maker can verify it on first inspection.