A Full Guide to Credential Evaluation for Employment

Written by Jeremy Yan | 09/06/2024

2024 isn't easy.

After moving to the USA and being ready to find a job to start your American Dream, you realized some of your dream jobs don’t recognize the foreign degree or diploma you have. They tell you that it is difficult for them to understand your qualifications unless you have a Credential Evaluation for Employment.

Now you may wonder what is Credential Evaluation for Employment? What you need to do for your career’s success? Stay positive, we are breaking everything down for you into a 5-step full guide:

Step 1: Know What Credential Evaluation for Employment Is

Credential Evaluation, or Foreign Credential Evaluation/Foreign Eduation Evaluation, is a service provided by professional evaluation agencies to evaluate educational backgrounds, grades, etc. obtained outside the US.

You may call us and ask to translate, validate, or transcribe your credentials but credential evaluation is more commonly used in this field.

Credential evaluation mainly includes 2 types of evaluations:

Foreign Degree Evaluation (Diploma Evaluation/Document by Document)
Transcript Evaluation (Course by Course)

with the purpose of making your foreign degree equivalent to a US degree， educational equivalency evaluation for employment， and foreign credits evaluation for work in USA.

For more information, click “What is Foreign Credential Evaluation?”

Step 2: Know How to Obtain Credential Evaluation for Employment

Generally, your future employer will tell you how to do credential evaluation. If not, simply ask them if they have guidelines for Credential Evaluation for Employment.

In most cases, they would just ask you to obtain a general credential evaluation from a trusted credential evaluation agency, and a foreign degree evaluation is often sufficient.

In addition, if you are not sure which employer you want to target at, you can just easily go to an experienced credential evaluation agency that provides degree evaluation services

The following video shows you how to apply for a job with Credential Evaluation:

(How to Apply for a Job in the United States?: Series #4 -Credential Evaluation, by Marilou Areno)

Step 3: Order Your Credential Evaluation for Employment

Once you have selected an organization, simply contact them to place your order and submit payment.

Please note, you will need to check their specific requirements for obtaining an evaluation. These requirements can vary between organizations, take American Education & Translation Services for example, we require the following documents:

Degree Certificate
Translated degree certificate by a certified translator
Transcripts
Translated transcripts by a certified translator (required if doing Transcript Evaluation)

One thing that needs to be noticed is that we ONLY require digital copies. In other words, you can simply scan or take pictures of your original documents and submit them to us via email, whereases most companies only recognize physical copies.

Contact us for more information.

Step 4: Know What to Expect from Ordered Credential Evaluation

Depending on the needs of your employer, you normally need to order either one of the following:

High School Diploma Evaluation

In the US, graduating from high school can be a big milestone for a family because going to college isn’t mandatory. With that said, having a high school diploma is the most common minimum educational requirement for employment here in the US.
(Find examples on Indeed.com)

However, “high school diploma” is an American term for secondary education and it actually has various names in other countries, such as “Bachiller” in Latin America and WASSCE (West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination) in West Africa.

For this reason, you may have to use a high school diploma evaluation to show employers that you have had an equivalence to meet the academic requirements for employment.

For more information of high school diploma equivalents, click here.

University Degree Evaluation

Besides minimum academic requirements, many professions and employers require you to have at least a university degree to indicate you have finished post-secondary education and training. Credentials in this are called bachelor’s or master’s degrees in the US. Same as different names for “high school diploma, Licentiate, Magister, Benke or Zhuanke are all used to represent post-secondary education in other countries.

In this case, a credential evaluation for employment is even more important by showing employers your academic level equivalency, which may give you the same opportunities as those who have the degrees in the US.

For more information of university degree equivalents, click here.

Step 5: Receive Job Offer with Credential Evaluation for Employment

After you have finished the 4 steps above, we believe now you are scheduled to have interviews soon.

Next up, you might have to study American gestures and words for the interviews because of coming from a different cultural background.

Finally, with the help of Credential Evaluation for Employment, you get a phone call from your dream job by announcing the offer! Congratulations on the milestone in the US!

Conclusion

In this article, we have broken down the process of how to do and what you can do with credential evaluation for employment. With the help of the evaluation report, you will be able to compete with those who went to US schools because your employers now know the equivalency of your foreign education background.

At the end of the day, we hope your credential evaluation for employment can lead you to a successful career.

At American Education & Translation Services, we aim to provide fast, affordable, and the cheapest foreign credential evaluation services for you.

With 15 years of experience, we have evaluated massive numbers of Foreign Credential Evaluations with 0 RFE or rejection from USCIS.

Besides that, to increase acceptance, we may include 2nd major or minors when your clients have cumulatively enough credits for a particular major to match your offered positions.

Contact us today for a FREE estimate!

What People Say about Us: All 5-Star Reviews

(All five-star reviews for AET)

Credential Evaluation Companies

Here we also collected some credential evaluation companies to save you time:

5 best education credential evaluations agencies:

They can all meet your needs for employment, immigration, and education.

If you live in Florida, California or Texas, we also listed the following educational evaluators for you:

Jeremy Yan, President & Director of Evaluation at AET

Immigrated to the U.S. back in 1998, Mr. Yan had worked for over 10 years in a prominent NACES (National Association of Credential Evaluation Services) company as a senior associate director and team leader. He has completed hundreds of thousands of foreign credential evaluation of documents from numerous foreign countries for various universities, licensing boards, U.S. government, and immigration services. He is a leading expert at American Education and Translation Services and was invited several times to be a keynote speaker to hundreds of admission counselors of U.S. universities.