Senior Spotlight: Meet Charlie Hoehnen, Senior Credential Analyst

At The Evaluation Company, every credential evaluation represents an important next step for an applicant. Our Senior Spotlight series introduces the experienced team members who help make that work possible.

Meet Charlie Hoehnen

Charlie Hoehnen is a Senior Credential Analyst at The Evaluation Company, where he helps interpret the education systems and histories behind the documents that cross his desk.

Through research and analysis, he supports applicants whose education must be understood across borders, and institutions that rely on accurate evaluations to make informed decisions.

Discovering a Career in Comparative Education

Charlie’s path into credential evaluation began in an unexpected place.

After graduating from college, he worked as a box office clerk at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee while playing in Milwaukee’s underground music community. There he met a fellow musician and writer who worked for a local credential evaluation agency, and a profession he had not known existed came into view.

He later joined Educational Credential Evaluators (ECE) as an associate and quickly became interested in the complexity of international education, work that brought together research, history, communication, and the chance to help others move toward meaningful goals.

“The more you learn about people and places different from yourself, the less scary that difference becomes,” Charlie says. “The same is true in the diversity of educational systems, institutions, and documents that paint a complicated, but beautiful, portrait of pedagogy in the world.”

Connecting Education Across Borders

For many applicants, a credential evaluation is an essential part of applying to a university, pursuing professional licensure, or entering the workforce in the United States. Charlie sees his work as a way to shorten the distance between educational systems.

“I see my role as a facilitator of understanding for people trying to make a better life for themselves in a place other than where they were educated and usually born,” he says. “The reward comes from connecting seemingly great distances and opening previously locked gates to someone’s hopes and dreams.”

A diploma or transcript may look straightforward on the surface, but understanding its full meaning often requires knowledge of institutional practices, national reforms, qualification frameworks, and historical developments.

Where History and Education Meet

One of Charlie’s strongest professional interests is the way history shapes modern education systems.

He is especially drawn to countries whose academic structures developed through colonial and postcolonial periods, where current credentials may reflect several educational traditions, changing political structures, or reforms introduced over decades. He particularly enjoys researching credentials from West African and Caribbean countries.

“To varying degrees, these education systems tell the stories of their past,” he explains.

That perspective is central to responsible evaluation. Rather than comparing documents on titles or surface-level similarities, evaluators have to consider how a qualification functions within its home education system.

Helping Others Grow in the Field

Charlie’s contribution extends beyond the reports he completes. Throughout his career he has trained new evaluators and helped other international education professionals strengthen their research and analytical skills, sharing his experience through conference sessions, online learning modules, and in-person training programs.

It is among the work he values most. Each person he trains carries that knowledge into future evaluations, applicant interactions, and institutional decisions.

Creativity, Community, and Life Outside Work

Outside the office, Charlie reads, practices yoga, plays card games, builds campfires, and camps with his family. He also writes fiction, creates songs, sings, and takes part in tabletop role-playing games. Music has remained an especially meaningful part of his life, connecting his current career to the creative community where he first learned the profession existed.

He is active in his local Catholic parish in Milwaukee and believes in finding practical ways to contribute, describing part of that commitment as getting into “good trouble” and pointing to the message, “Blessed are the merciful.”

A Few Quick Highlights

Favorite place you have traveled: Quebec

Favorite food or cuisine: I love all the food, but especially the great Wisconsin cheese curd.

A word your teammates might use to describe you: Persistent

If you were not working in credential evaluation, what career might you have pursued? Try my hand at writing fiction full-time or opening a gaming store.

Book, movie, podcast, or activity you often recommend to others: Book: VALIS by Philip K. Dick. Movie: Au hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson.