Lessons Learned from Starting Our Language Industry Careers: Part 2
- Kyle Chow
- Nov 14, 2024
- 3 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
By MIIS Alumni Kyle Chow and Yuxuan Lai

Kyle and Lai are both recent alumni from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) at Monterey, a graduate school with a localization management master's program, and as people who entered the language industry during these uncertain times, we learned a lot through our experiences that we’d like to share to others who are newer to the industry.In last month’s newsletter, we shared some tips on approaching the job search as the language industry continues to change. So, what about when you finally land that job?
Well first, congratulations! Entering the industry is a huge milestone to celebrate, but remember also that this is the beginning of a new journey, and you make sure you start off with the right mindset. In line with that, here’s a couple tips Kyle has based on his experiences:
Keep expectations realistic. After investing so much time into the job search, it’s only natural when beginning the job itself that we have high expectations. For those of us coming from MIIS: Our coursework does an amazing job providing practical skills in project management, localization technology, managing stakeholders, etc., and many of us hope to have opportunities to actively apply all of that in our work. In some cases, the job matches those expectations. But in other cases, it ends up being more limited in scope than we thought, or it ends up being more busy work than it initially let on, and we can’t help but feel a little bit of “this is it?” - I know I did with my first full-time job after graduating MIIS. And that’s perfectly normal! It certainly doesn’t mean all efforts were in vain. It merely means that you’re just on the first step of a long journey that makes up your whole career.
It can be easy to compare ourselves to others around us who we perceive as getting to do more than us, but the important thing is to stay focused on yourself. No matter what the job, you’re going to be using some sort of skill. What is that skill? What are you getting out of your work? What are you finding out about yourself through this experience? As time passes, you’re only going to gain more experience, and as long as you keep actively checking in with yourself and maintain the mindset that learning is a lifelong journey rather than a sprint, you will find that you are growing meaningfully.
Every experience is worth something even if it’s not a positive one. Perhaps your particular workplace really does give you a negative experience, though. I experienced this with my first full time position after MIIS, where the duties listed in the job description were very different from the duties I actually ended up doing. Much of my work was doing painfully manual processes to import files into a translation tool for other coordinators, and while I tried many times to start discussions to improve these manual processes, I felt they always went unheard and I was stuck being the team’s personal file importer.
This led me to think: What could I possibly be getting out of this? I realized, though, that even if I ultimately didn’t succeed, I got experience trying many, many different tactics on how to start discussions about process changes, forcing me to think outside the box and approach problems from a bunch of different angles.
When those efforts failed, I ended up teaching myself basic Powershell to automate some of the manual processes I did on a daily basis. And guess what? Being able to tell that story of how my company’s circumstances led me to teach myself Powershell was one of the reasons I made it through my interviews for what would become my next job. So in the end, it was because I had that negative experience that I got a better job I likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise! It just goes to show - every experience you have is meaningful. You might not enjoy your job in the moment, but it’s important to remember that even if you’re not seeing the results you wished for immediately, you are always gaining something and you never know when that something might pay off in unexpected ways.
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