Your International Experience Is Worth Less Than You Think, and More Than You Realise
In early 2017, a few weeks after Janvi and I moved back to Mumbai, I sat across a table from a purchasing manager at a large Indian pharmaceutical company and understood, for the first time, how little of my old life had made the journey with me.
I had arrived with the kind of CV that had always done my talking: Stanford, a law degree, Google, and years at a top American intellectual property firm. In the life I had just left, those names opened rooms before I entered them.
The man across the table did not ask about any of it. He wanted to know whether my father's word still held, and whether I understood how his industry actually worked.
I did not. Not yet.
My father had spent forty years building an indenting agency, representing pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers from around the world and creating markets for their products in India. It was a business built on relationships and patience. I had joined him to learn, and in those first months, learning meant shadowing. It meant sitting quietly in rooms where my credentials carried no weight at all, watching a man with no American degrees navigate India with a fluency I did not have.
It would be easy to read that story as a warning. It is closer to a calibration. What I learned in those rooms, slowly and sometimes painfully, is that both of the things returnees believe about their international experience are true at the same time. It is worth less than you think. It is also worth more than you realise. The work is in understanding which parts are which, before the market teaches you at full price.
The assumption that travels with youAlmost everyone I speak to who is seriously considering the move carries a version of the same assumption.
They rarely say it out loud, because said out loud it sounds naive. It goes something like this: I have built a strong career abroad, and that career will transfer, roughly intact, with some adjustment for salary.
The assumption feels reasonable because it has been true within one world. Move from New York to London, or from Seattle to Austin, and your experience does transfer roughly intact. The title explains you. The employer names explain you. The market reads your CV the way you intend it to be read.
Moving back to India is a different kind of move. You are asking one professional world to read a document written in the language of another. Some of it translates beautifully. Some of it does not translate at all. And the parts that fail are rarely the parts you expected.
What does not translateThe first thing to go is the automatic weight of the title. Abroad, your title and your firm did a great deal of quiet work on your behalf.
They told people what you were worth before you spoke. In India, especially outside the multinationals, that shorthand thins out fast. Hierarchy still matters enormously in most Indian workplaces, and it runs on its own logic. Your opinion as the newest person in the room will carry less automatic weight than you are used to, even if you are right, and even if everyone in the room privately agrees with you.
Coming from Google and a US law firm, I was used to a culture where pushing back on a senior was expected of me. In India, I had to learn a different kind of influence, one that worked through relationships and patience rather than directness and debate. The meeting before the meeting, where the real decision gets made over chai or dinner, is not a quirk of the system. It is the system. It took me time to stop resenting that and start working with it.
The second thing to go is the premium itself.
The returnee premium is real. Your international experience genuinely does open the first conversation. People are curious about you. The names on your CV still glow a little. But the premium is finite, and it expires quickly. Somewhere in the second or third conversation, the question quietly changes from where you have been to whether you understand where you now are. If the answer is a US playbook with the currency converted, the glow fades in front of you.
And underneath both of these sits the loss nobody prices in. For years, when someone asked what you did, the answer was easy, and the answer was impressive. In my first years back, working inside a family business I had not built, I could not easily explain what I did. I was contributing meaningfully and drawing a fair salary, and still the question made me flinch. Learning to measure my own worth by something other than what I could put on a business card took longer than any other adjustment, and I have since heard a version of that sentence from almost every returnee I have worked with.
What translates better than you expectHere is the other half, and it deserves to be said just as plainly. The things that survive the journey are the things you were never explicitly paid for.
Judgement, and the ability to operate between two business cultures without belonging fully to either. The instinct for how a US or European headquarters actually thinks, which cannot be taught to someone who has not lived inside one. In the right room, these are rare and they are valuable, and India currently has more of the right rooms than at any point I can remember.
Some context on the moment you would be arriving into. India's employment outlook hit a record high in early 2026, the strongest of any country surveyed globally. [1] The large American technology companies added tens of thousands of jobs in India last year while tightening at home. [2] And the fastest growing part of this market, the Global Capability Centres that multinationals run in India, is built almost perfectly for a returnee. These are the in-house arms of firms like Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Microsoft and Google, more than two thousand centres employing over two million professionals, doing the core engineering, product, finance and research work of their parent companies. [3] A GCC role almost always means working with global teams across time zones, so the years you spent abroad are the job rather than something to explain away.
There is one more force reshaping this market, and it cuts both ways. India built much of its prosperity on technology services and knowledge work, which are exactly the categories AI is compressing most aggressively. The junior work of research, drafting, analysis and data processing is thinning out here just as it is everywhere else, and anyone returning to build a career needs to understand where that disruption is heading.
But the same shift is creating a scarcity on the other side of it. India recorded well over a quarter of a million AI-linked roles last year, and hiring for them is projected to grow by roughly a third this year. [4] By 2027, demand for people who can genuinely work with these tools is expected to cross two million, running well ahead of supply. [5] Salaries in AI-related roles are climbing at a pace the rest of the market cannot match. [6] Which leads to a possibility worth sitting with: if you have spent the past few years abroad building real fluency with AI, in markets where the tools arrived earlier and adoption ran ahead, that skill set may be worth more in India than it was in the place you learned it. Abroad, you were one of many. Here, for the moment, you are scarce.
There is also a version of the move that did not really exist before 2020. A growing number of people now come back while keeping the role they already have, working remotely for a foreign employer from an Indian base. It is a bridge rather than a destination for most, and it comes with real trade-offs around time zones and belonging. But it means the choice is no longer binary in the way it was when I made it.
None of this arrives automatically. The market is expansionary, and it is also demanding. The returnees who do well are the ones who show up with genuine curiosity about how India works now, rather than a memory of how it worked when they left. The experience opens the door. The curiosity is what gets you invited to stay.
The examination that mattersSo both truths hold. Your experience is worth less than you think, because the shorthand fades and the premium expires faster than anyone warns you.
It is worth more than you realise, because the deeper capabilities underneath it are scarce in a market that has never been hungrier for them.
Which means the honest work, before you move, is an audit. What exactly am I assuming will transfer, and which of those assumptions have I actually tested? Where would someone in my sector, at my level, in the city I am targeting, actually sit today?
Your international experience is not the problem. The assumptions you are carrying about how it will be received are worth examining.
I made most of my examinations after landing, in rooms where the tuition was expensive. You have the option of doing yours earlier.
Where to startI built the Career Calibrator for exactly this audit. It takes about five minutes.
It asks about your sector, your level, your current compensation and your target city, and it gives you an honest read on where your real opportunities sit, along with the blind spots most common for a profile like yours.
It will not tell you whether to move. It will tell you which of your assumptions deserve a harder look, which is the more useful thing to know. Take it.
The rest of the territoryThis essay is one argument from a much larger map.
Module 1 of the India Life Blueprint covers the working landscape in full: where the hiring energy actually sits, sector by sector, the Global Capability Centres in the detail they deserve, how AI is redrawing the ladder you would be climbing, and what the returnee premium is really worth once the first conversation ends. Then it gets practical in ways an essay cannot: how Indian hiring actually runs, from sixty-day notice periods to background checks that stumble over foreign employment history, how to read a CTC offer so the number means what you think it means, what the record market implies at your seniority, and the honest case for keeping your foreign job as a remote bridge. If this essay changed your question, the module is where you work the answer.
Next week we talk about money, and about the number that is waiting to tell you what it means. Until then, a question to carry with you: Which of your assumptions about how you will be received have you actually tested?
In honest company,
— Rumit-
[1] ManpowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey, Q2 2026. India's Net Employment Outlook of 68% is a record high and the strongest reading of any country surveyed.
[2] Company hiring disclosures, 2025. Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Netflix collectively added over 32,000 jobs in India, an 18% increase year on year.
[3] Zinnov-NASSCOM GCC Landscape in India FY2026, with the EY GCC Pulse Survey. India hosts 2,117 Global Capability Centres employing 2.36 million professionals.
[4] foundit (formerly Monster APAC & ME), India Hiring Insights, January 2026. Companies posted 290,256 AI-linked roles in India in 2025, with AI hiring projected to grow 32% year on year in 2026 to nearly 380,000 positions.
[5] Bain & Company, AI Talent Report, 2025. AI-related job vacancies in India are projected to exceed 2.3 million by 2027, against a talent pool of roughly 1.2 million.
[6] TeamLease Digital, Digital Skills and Salary Primer FY2025-26. The AI talent gap is projected at 53% by 2026, with roughly one qualified engineer for every ten open generative AI roles.