On Nancy Nouaimeh’s Excellence Foresight Podcast, we got into a question that keeps coming up for experienced professionals: when did experience become a liability?
The idea that experienced workers slow organizations down is nonsense. In a fast-changing market, experience is not the problem. The problem is that too many organizations still don’t know how to recognize, use, or integrate it.
Nancy and I talked about age bias, “overqualified” as a lazy label, and why leaders need to rethink the way they build teams. But there’s also a message here for mid-career professionals who are trying to get traction in this market.
Your experience has value, but you can’t assume other people will automatically understand it.
That means you have to translate it. Don’t just tell war stories from twenty years ago. Don’t rely on your resume to explain why you matter. Frame your experience in terms of the problems you solve now, the judgment you bring now, and the impact you can make now.
For anyone feeling dismissed, stuck, or boxed in by outdated assumptions about age and experience, I hope this conversation is a useful reminder: you are not done.
But you do have to make your value visible.
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