Education Verification

This verification has become very important as in recent times many employees pose fake graduation or post graduation certificates to land their dream jobs or for better pay or designation. Recently a senior manager working in a reputed company was ousted from his position when it was discovered that his IIM qualifications were forged. The recent fake pilot scam also reinforces the need for a proper education verification conducted by trusted third party verification agencies.

Through this verification, the legitimacy of an employee’s education with respect to the degree, year of completion and the course pursued is verified by contacting the educational institution directly.

The Challenges

• Only a few of the higher education institutions have placed their graduates’ lists online. In addition, the HRD Ministry sponsored National Database of Academic Qualifications  is still in the development stage. So a physical visit to the institution becomes imperative in most cases.
• The commonly followed method of this verification is, just a physical inspection of the certificates. Manipulating certificates is not a big deal in the current age of technology making such method fraught with risk.y.
• Verifying over courier/post, phone, and email or via any electronic means is virtually impossible except for a handful of universities.

Therefore, the best and only reliable method is that a designated officer physically visits the registrar’s office with a photocopy of the certificate, mark sheets and sometimes even hall cards to verify the authenticity of the degree.

Certain important aspects of this verification:

• Colleges and Universities usually provide verification via a manual process through their own staff.
• Usually the verification is conducted within a period of one to two weeks but sometimes for graduates who have passed out years ago, it might take a bit longer.
• Some schools ask for candidate's disclosure and release form before issuing the verification.
• If the candidate is a female, it should be made sure that the information submitted reflects the actual (maiden) name with which the candidate graduated, as at times, she might provide her married name, which might be different from the maiden one.
• Most of the verification agencies would not verify degrees belonging to universities categorized as fake by the UGC, and revert the verification request to the employer.

Our recommendation:

We can verify certificates across Class X, Class XII, Bachelor’s, and Master’s and Doctorate levels. At the minimum, we recommend that the highest-level certificate for every employee must be verified.