Reframe Experience as Your Top Asset

In my recent Expert Insight conversation with John Golden from Sales POP! and Pipeliner CRM, we dug into what it really means to navigate a mid-career transition in a job market that’s obsessed with youth. If you’re 45+ and feeling like employers have quietly decided you’ve passed your sell-by date, this one’s for you. I start by acknowledging the obvious: ageism is real. But staying stuck in resentment about it doesn’t move the needle.

The lever you can pull is adopting a growth mindset and getting crystal clear about what you love to do, do well, and can turn into a relevant value proposition for today’s business problems. That requires shifting from an “outside-in” job search (“Where do I fit into their posting?”) to an “inside-out” approach (“Here’s the business problem I’m great at solving. Connect me to a company that needs this.”).

We talk about why most online job descriptions are written for people with 5–15 years of experience, and why roles for seasoned professionals usually live in the hidden job market: the referral marketplace. That’s why relationships matter more than résumés at this stage.

Your job in finding a job is to define your “product–market fit” and then use your network to find the environments where what you offer actually belongs. We debunk the common advice to cut off your résumé listings older than 10 years and scrub the dates. You can absolutely summarize earlier roles, but don’t erase them. You’re shouldn’t try to hide your age.

It provides valuable context for the deep skills you’re bringing with you today. We also tackle the “overqualified” label head-on and how to reframe it. Often, what hiring managers really mean is, “I don’t understand why you want this job if you’ve done so much more.” You need to explain why, at this stage, you’re less interested in climbing the corporate ladder (or taking their job) and more interested in doing the work that is meaningful to you, even if that’s in an individual contributor role.

I wrap by sharing how my role at DreamWorks Animation didn’t come from a job posting at all, but from multiple informational interviews that led to them creating a role for me based on those conversations. That’s the power of an inside-out, relationship-driven career strategy. It’s exactly what I help mid-career professionals, especially MBAs, build for themselves.