Assesment, Certifications and Translations

Yeah! Now I have all the information I promessed ;)

The reason for everything: A lot of immigrants come to Canada with an university degree from another country. Some careers are regulated and need to obtain a license and some are not. Mine is not regulated so I don't need to get a license but I can get an assesment so I know the equivalent of my career in Canada.

It's not necessary to do this, but there are places like Career Bridge, that ask for this assesment so you can register with them. Career Bridge has employment offers oriented to immigrants, where all the options are paid internships (aprox. $2.000 a month) from 4 to 6 months, with the possibility of staying there full time.

If you decide that you want to do the assesment, you need your university degree and your marks, then you have 3 options, with the University of Toronto, WES or ICAS.

• University of Toronto: The general report is $100 and it takes between 10 and 12 weeks. If you need it sooner, you can get it in 48 hours for $300, and they accept photocopies of the documents, but you need to pay in cash or debit.
• WES: The general report is $115 and it takes 7 working days, you can pay with credit card, but the university needs to send the marks in a sealed envelop.
• ICAS: The general report is $80 and it takes 10 working days (you can have it in 3 working days for $60 but call beforehand to make sure they can do it those days) and you can pay with credit card. They need you to send the original documents with a set of photocopies and they return de originals with the report, or you can send certified copies and they keep those.

As you can see, the best option is ICAS, and thats the one we took; today we sent all the papers ;)

All the options need that you send the documents in the original language and translated to english (or french if you want the report in french). If you are going to translate them here (it's not necessary), we used COSTI. The certified translation of 6 pages was $375.

For ICAS we decided to send certified copies, since the UCV diploma is a little bit big. If you decide to do that, I recommend in Toronto the services of this public notary since are the ones that charge less and do a good service. If you check the diferent notaries, you are going to find that almost everyone charge $39 the first page and a little less the rest, but the ones we used were $12.95 the first page and $7.95 the rest ($52 for 6 pages), plus taxes.

Something funny... they charge less because they don't have an office, so they normally see you in a coffee place, but something happened today and we had to do everything outside in a very warm -5C, so we ended up with freezing, but it was worth it :D