A growing number of sport participants migrate within and between nations for a variety of reasons, such as athletic career development, sport tourism, and international assignments. During 2013, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) estimated that 214 million individuals were considered to be migrants, which is one in every 33 persons worldwide. This presentation builds on the ISSP Position Stand on transnationalism, mobility, and acculturation in and through sport (Ryba et al., 2017) to introduce a transnational conceptual framework used in recent studies of athletic migrants’ career and life transitions. First, migration terminology will be reviewed to facilitate the attendees’ understanding of the experiential layers of athletes’ experiences discussed in the presentations comprising this symposium. Next, we focus on a study of transnational elite athletes’ careers to clarify the processes activated in cultural transition that produce psychosocial development through work, sport, and relationships in shifting cultural patterns of meaning. Having positioned the migrants’ experiences in critical acculturation literature (Bhatia & Ram, 2009; Ryba et al., 2015; Schinke et al., 2016), we derived at a temporal model of the cultural transition process consisting of three phases: pre-transition, acute acculturation, and sociocultural adaptation. The empirical model and three underlying mechanisms of cultural transition that assisted athletic career adaptability of transnational migrants will be discussed. We conclude with practical implications of this research for professionals working in the fields of career counseling and migrant support.