5 Career Pathways Beyond Localization

Choose your own career adventure!

One of the advantages of working in localization and international expansion roles is the breadth of experiences available. While many are drawn into localization through project management expertise or linguistic craft, the work inevitably demands a rapid build up of knowledge across every domain.

The nature of localization requires deep interface across the entire organization, spanning finance, legal, marketing, product, engineering, customer support & success, sales and strategy. This presents a unique opportunity for localization professionals to gain knowledge, insights and partners in every part of the organization. It also opens up multiple career pathways beyond localization for those that want to change direction.

So, why do so many in the localization industry feel their career options are limited?

Self-Limiting Beliefs

Localization teams don’t get the credit they deserve. More often than not, localization only shows up on a senior leader’s desk when there is a problem. Much of the daily fire-fighting, negotiating, managing overlapping projects and triaging complex issues gets over-looked.

If they are fortunate, localization teams will be included on a product release celebration, or heralded by the marketing leader for their heroics.

This cycle can perpetuate a sense a caution and conservatism among localization teams. Unfortunately, this risk-averse approach is contagious and can instill self-limiting beliefs across the localization team. In this scenario, busy, overworked localization teams will double down on their core responsibilities and skills, focusing on delivery excellence.

If you want to expand your career horizons and gain experiences outside of the localization domain, it’s important to step outside of your daily routine and tasks. Forget about your current job title, for now. Ask yourself instead:

• What work am I most proud of?

• What do I love to do, and hate to do?

• What am I interested in?

Use your connections with internal stakeholders to build rapport and to understand more about their department and jobs. This will help you evaluate your own career wish list against some of the many roles and teams that you interface with.

Once you strip away job titles and preconceived ideas of career stages, you will unearth a broad array of career pathways that are compatible - in fact, overlapping! - with localization.

Universal Skills vs Domain Expertise

Think about some of the high-performing colleagues you worked with in the past. What do you remember about their work output and impact? Perhaps their creativity, problem-solving skills, collaboration skills or ability to communicate at different levels? Certainly, they would have excelled in their domain and context, but domain expertise requires a broader set of skills to achieve durable career success.

All of us gain universal skills in our jobs that are highly transferable. These skills tend to get obscured by job titles and long lists of candidate requirements. Yet, it’s the universal skills that you will rely on every time to take up a new challenge.

When you hone and intentionally sharpen these universal skills, you can start to apply them in new areas where domain expertise alone is insufficient. Some of these skills that are prevalent among localization professionals include:

1. Cultural awareness and adaptability: understanding and respecting different cultures is critical across countless roles, to avoid mistakes, offer diverse opinions and ensure inclusiveness.

2. Strategic thinking: developing and implementing strategies that span global markets and encompass technology, project management, supply chain logistics and corporate goals is an essential capability for business success.

3. Communication: clear, effective and precise communication is paramount for most roles. Developing this skill across language and cultural barriers and among diverse stakeholder groups reinforces the importance of clarity.

4. Project management: localization projects are enormously complex to manage, due to their interdependent and cross-matrix nature. Managing budgets, timelines and stakeholders is a universally recognized skill.

5. Customer empathy: being able to understand and address the needs and preferences of customers in different cultural contexts is rare. In many ways, this skill is a secret weapon that localization professionals may be unaware that they possess.

If you are considering a lateral career move, it can be feel daunting to apply for a distinctly different job title - particularly if the job description expects strong domain expertise. However, job descriptions are more like wish lists than must-haves. Instead of focusing on your gaps, focus on what unique perspective you can bring to augment the team.

5 Career Pathways

Let’s examine 5 different career pathways that are entirely viable directions for localization professionals to pursue.

While some of these roles are dominated by individuals with particular qualifications or traditional career stages, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. A strong hiring manager will look beyond job titles and instead look for team fit, adaptability and strong core skills when reviewing candidates.

If you are interested in pursuing any of these roles, consider how you might embark on a trial project first, within your own company. This is the ideal way to gain hands-on experience, build rapport with your future hiring manager and validate your interest in the role. This can be a win-win scenario for you and the partner team, with very little downside risk. You will likely find a very willing partner team that is happy to have an eager volunteer offer some assistance.

1. Product Manager

While the nature of their work is significantly different to localization professionals, product managers require many of the same skills to be effective in their role. The core skills needed are:

1. Strategic thinking

2. Customer empathy

3. Communication skills

4. Data analysis

5. Prioritization and decision-making

These skills strongly overlap with the work of localization PMs or engineers. The key challenge is the ability to demonstrate and describe how you have gained and utilized these skills in your previous roles.

Some of the trial projects to consider for a Product Manager role:

• Conduct user interviews among international customers and summarize the findings

• Analyze product metrics for priority markets and propose improvements

• Volunteer to become the “International Product Manager” for a new feature and ensure it is designed to global-first standards

• Create a prioritized feature request backlog for international customers and bring it for approval

2. Global Marketing Manager

If you manage localization within a marketing department, it’s a relatively short jump to become a global marketing manager. In fact, for many localization PMs, their role may be indistinguishable from a marketing manager, albeit with different time emphasis.

A successful global marketing manager will typically exhibit the following:

1. Cultural awareness and adaptability

2. Strategic planning on a global scale

3. Digital marketing expertise

4. Data analysis and market research skills

5. Project management and coordination

Many of these skills are essential for executing an effective localization program. To strengthen your credentials and position yourself for a global marketing manager role, consider adopting some of the same measures of success and terminology that your marketing team tracks. Leaning into data analysis and market-appropriate digital marketing tactics will pay off here.

Here are some trial projects to establish hands-on experience in the role:

• Conduct A/B search ad campaign for international markets

• Create a hyper-localization plan and measure the impact

• Coordinate a multi-country product launch plan

• Analyze market trends and present findings

3. Customer Success Manager

The best customer success managers have better product knowledge than the product team that shipped it. CSMs understand the context, use case, problematic areas, workarounds and power user tricks and use this knowledge to help their customers get the most out of the product. Coincidentally, linguists, localization engineers and localization PMs gain much of the same product know-how as they deliver international experiences.

Testing localized versions of a product and working through internationalization issues requires extensive product knowledge and context that would be highly beneficial for a Customer Success Manager. The typical skills for an excellent CSM include:

1. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills

2. Problem-solving abilities

3. Product knowledge

4. Empathy

5. Data analysis for customer insights

Localization professionals gain these skills over the course of multiple international product releases and can find numerous opportunities to augment any missing skills. There are many trial projects to consider to gain experience, including:

• Develop an on-boarding process for international customers

• Analyze international customer feedback and create a prioritized list of concerns

• Conduct a customer training session

• Identify and champion key product requirements to improve retention for international customers

4. Product Marketing Manager

The role of Product Marketing Manager is an interesting blend of product, marketing, research and analysis. For larger organizations, it’s common to see international product marketing managers who have the context and awareness of local market conditions and competitors to craft a better story and launch plan. Localization PMs can stretch into this direction by leaning on many of the same skills that are critical in the role:

1. Strong storytelling and communication skills

2. Market and competitive analysis skills

3. Cross-functional collaboration

4. Data-driven decision making

5. Launch planning and execution

If you are in localization and want to take on a trial project to gain experience and learn more about the role of a Product Marketing Manager, start with one of the following:

• Create a go-to-market product plan for a particular market

• Create and refine international user personas for your product

• Plan and execute an international product launch

• Create a competitive analysis plan for one of your key markets

5. User Researcher

At the heart of a user researcher lies the ability to synthesize fundamental user requirements to inform new product capabilities. Gathering deep insights from users, market analysis, research projects and product data requires steady judgment and a keen awareness of product strategy.

For many companies, user research tends to be anglo-centric in nature, creating an unintended blind spot in global product design and strategy. For localization professionals, this offers a particular advantage: understanding the perspective of international users and their diverse requirements.

The core skills of user researchers are not dissimilar to that of localization PMs, such as:

1. Research methodology expertise

2. Data analysis

3. Empathy and active listening

4. Clear communication skills

5. Collaboration with product and design teams

Most product teams will lament the lack of time for in-depth user research and will welcome help in this direction. Consider some of the following trial projects to gain experience and get closer to the team:

• Design and execute a usability test for a feature

• Create international user personas based on research findings

• Conduct international customer interviews and market-based surveys

• Lead an in-depth research trip for a specific market

Taking Action

It’s important to emphasize that localization isn’t merely a career launch pad into another discipline. There are countless deep, lateral and vertical moves within localization that can encompass a rich, fulfilling and successful career.

However, for many localization professionals, the connections that are forged with marketing or product or engineering ignite a spark of interest that merits further exploration. In this scenario, creating pathways into adjacent careers is the pragmatic way forward.

If you have identified a pathway you wish to explore, start by cultivating strong connections with your peers in those teams. It’s much easier to make these moves within your own organization, but still possible from the outside.

As with all career ambitions, it pays to be transparent and vocal. People generally like to be helpful, so express your interest in exploring alternative career paths and ask questions about how you can learn more. Look for opportunities to start assisting your partner team in small ways as a prelude to taking on a full trial project.

It’s best to look at a career shift over the course of 2-3 years, rather than a couple of months. Map out the shifts you want to see and build towards your new career destination. When you get there, you will realize the unique benefits that your localization background brings you, compared to your peers.