Case study: Sue - Senior Project/Account Manager

Sue's passion for languages was fired at a young age by holidays to Belgium and France to visit family friends, and then continued at school where she studied German, French and Spanish.

Like many of her peers, she wanted to 'do something with languages' in her future career but didn't really know what! There weren't many opportunities in the early 80s to follow a career in languages; teaching, interpreting/translation and bilingual secretarial work being the three main options.

Sue chose to follow the latter route and studied to become a bilingual secretary in French and Spanish. She spent a number of years working for international companies using her language skills in a senior administrative role. Soon, however, her job became more 'secretarial' than 'bilingual secretarial'. This persuaded her to enrol on an Open University degree in French and English Literature, which she hoped would lead to new opportunities.

With project management you get to see both sides of the business - no two days are the same!

She spent the next 5 years working towards her OU degree. During this time she moved to two different continents and back because of her husband's job commitments. She graduated in 2002 with a BA (Open) in French and English Literature. She considered teaching and worked as a teacher's assistant for 2 terms at her local school before deciding that this wasn't the route she wanted to follow. She had just returned from her annual holiday in France determined to find a job where she could use all her previous skills and recent OU degree, when the job as a Project Manager with Lingo24 Ltd appeared in the local newspaper. It seemed too good to be true!

"If you don't want to go down the teaching or translating route, working as a Project Manager for a translation company is the perfect choice!" says Sue.

"It combines both project management and language skills and no two days are the same. One day you could be handling a multilingual newsletter translation in six European languages, the next day you're dealing with an enquiry for a language you've never heard of! You also get to work with both clients and translators and see both sides of the translation business."

If you love languages, a challenge and loads of variety then becoming a Project Manager could just be right for you!