Who we are and why this firm exists
Gulf Credentials is a licensing and credentialing advisory firm for the six GCC states. We take healthcare professionals, engineers and certified specialists through regulator registration: eligibility, verification, examinations, application and renewal. We are not a recruitment agency and we do not handle immigration paperwork.
Why does a licensing advisory firm need to exist?
Because the credential is the gate, and almost nobody explains it until you are already behind it. A hospital in Dubai cannot employ a nurse who is not licensed by the relevant health authority. A contractor in Riyadh cannot put an engineer on site who is not registered with the Saudi Council of Engineers. The offer is not the hard part. The regulator is.
The process is also genuinely difficult to navigate from outside the region. Requirements are spread across portals in several languages. Different emirates license separately, so a licence valid in Dubai is not valid in Abu Dhabi or inside Dubai Healthcare City. Documents have to be attested in a specific order, by specific bodies, in the country that issued them. Miss one step and the application comes back weeks later.
Meanwhile the same search that brings people to this problem brings them to firms promising jobs, guaranteed licences and pass rates. Those promises are either unenforceable or untrue. We built this firm around the opposite proposition: publish what things cost, say what we cannot promise, and charge for work rather than outcomes.
What do we actually do?
We manage the four stages every GCC regulator puts you through, set out in full on how it works.
- Eligibility. Which authorities you can register with, at which grade or title, and what currently stands in the way. This conversation is free, and it sometimes ends with us telling you not to proceed yet.
- Verification. Managing primary source verification, which takes 15-25 working days when the document set is complete and considerably longer when it is not.
- Examination. Establishing whether an examination applies to you, and preparing you for it if it does.
- Application and renewal. The portal submission, tracking it, answering the authority, and holding the renewal and continuing education dates afterwards.
Alongside that we prepare profession-specific CVs for Gulf screening, and we check employment offers and employers against official registries before a candidate commits to anything. What we refuse to do is set out on what we do not do, in as much detail as what we sell.
How are you different from a recruitment agency?
Recruitment is a licensed activity with its own regulator and its own rules about who may charge whom. We do not hold that licence and we do not do that work. A recruiter is paid by an employer to fill a role. We are paid by you to get a regulator to accept your qualifications, which is useful whichever employer you end up with, and useful even if you stay where you are and register as a second-country credential.
The practical difference is what we are able to promise. A recruiter can talk about roles. We can only talk about process, because the licensing decision belongs to the regulator alone. That is a narrower promise and we would rather make a narrow one we can keep.
How do you charge?
Two separate kinds of money, kept separate on purpose.
We publish every regulator fee we know of, itemised by authority, with the date we last checked it, on the costs page. We do not publish our own advisory fee, because it varies by profession, authority, the number of credentials to verify and whether an examination applies. It is quoted in writing, fixed, after a free eligibility consultation, and we never take a percentage of a salary.
Who is accountable for what we publish?
Every fee and timeline on this site is read from a single published figures file, and every figure carries the date it was last checked. We review it quarterly. Where we do not have a verified figure we say so rather than estimating, which is why you will occasionally see a marked gap rather than a number.
Our company registration, trade licence and offices are set out on our licence and registration, including how to verify them against the issuing registry rather than taking our word for it. The people who do the work are listed on our team.
Where are you based?
Operations, delivery and candidate support run from our headquarters in India. We hold a Dubai DET trade licence for our office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, number [REPLACE_LICENCE].