Maintaining your personal documentation portfolio

"Speaking from personal experience, there's one sod's law that always seems to apply when you are trying to hack your way through the jungle of overseas documentation.

When you are applying for official permits or licences, in many countries you invariably need to be able to produce a mind-boggling amount of personal documentation - much of it translated and "attested" (see below) - far more than you could ever imagine back here in the UK .

And, of course - especially if you have queued for a couple of hours in stifling heat - the one form you didn't bring with you is the one document on which your application hinges.

I certainly learned this the hard way in Dubai when I applied for a residence permit and was told I needed to show my marriage certificate. In the UK , your marriage certificate is rarely needed for anything, and mine was in a packing case back in Edinburgh - so we had some fun retrieving that!

So here's a tip from my personal experience which you may want to adapt or pass on to your export colleagues.

Build up a comprehensive portfolio of every personal certificate you can think of - every educational qualification you've ever possessed, all the kid's details, everything. If you think you need to, get them "attested" and copied, - and be prepared for a fair bit of legwork along the way!

To get a work permit in some countries, for example, that may mean sending your old Higher or even "O" level school certificates back to the Scottish Qualifications Authority to attest that they are accurate and that the SQA, or its predecessor, did indeed make the awards shown.

Then you might have to take that document to the local embassy to get it stamped, then get it translated and then have to take the translation back to the embassy for its own attestation stamp!

Once I had absolutely everything in place in my portfolio, I carried it with me every time I applied for a permit of any kind.

It may sound like overkill, but this discipline enabled me to sail first-time through many potentially tortuous applications. It's well worth doing if you don't like queuing!"