Too Senior Is Not a Skill Gap
There’s a moment that happens to many people later in their careers that no one prepares you for.
You’re no longer told you lack experience. You’re no longer told you need to grow. Instead, you’re told—directly or indirectly—that you’re too senior. Not in a celebratory way. Not in a “we value what you bring” way. In a way that quietly closes doors.
What’s striking is how often “too senior” is treated as if it were a deficit. As if experience itself were a gap that needs explaining, justifying, or minimizing. It isn’t.
After decades in male-dominated industries and returning to corporate life again, I’ve come to see this phrase for what it really is: a placeholder for discomfort. When someone says “too senior,” they are rarely talking about skills.
They are talking about uncertainty. Uncertainty about how to place someone in a hierarchy that wasn’t built for depth. Uncertainty about how to manage someone who has already seen systems fail. Uncertainty about whether that person will tolerate inefficiency, politics, or poorly reasoned decisions.
Those are not capability concerns. They are control concerns. I’ve lived this personally.
After years in executive roles, I found myself in conversations where my background was acknowledged—but not leveraged. Where experience was politely noted and then quietly set aside. Where I was evaluated less on what I could do and more on how easily I could be absorbed.
“Too senior” didn’t mean I lacked skills. It meant I carried context. And context can be inconvenient.
People with long careers ask different questions. They hear subtext faster. They recognize patterns earlier. They don’t confuse enthusiasm with feasibility.
That doesn’t slow organizations down. It makes them more honest. But honesty can feel disruptive in cultures optimized for speed, optics, and short-term wins. So experience gets reframed.
Instead of being described as wisdom, it’s described as rigidity. Instead of being seen as foresight, it’s labeled resistance. Instead of being valued as leadership, it’s treated as misalignment.
Too senior. As if years of learning somehow made someone less capable of learning more.
Here’s what decades of work have taught me.
Experience doesn’t make someone inflexible. It makes them discerning.
It doesn’t mean they can’t adapt. It means they adapt with awareness of cost.
It doesn’t mean they’re stuck in the past. It means they understand what repeating it looks like.
And yet, people with deep experience are often asked to prove adaptability in ways others aren’t. Their background is treated as something to be managed rather than leveraged. Their judgment is viewed as potential friction instead of stabilizing force.
That difference isn’t about skill. It’s about perception. And perception has consequences.
People begin editing their résumés. Removing titles. Downplaying scope. Softening language. Not because they want to—but because they’re trying to stay viable.
They are told, implicitly, that the very things they worked decades to build now make them harder to place. This is not a personal failure. It’s a systemic one.
Organizations that don’t know how to integrate senior talent often mistake depth for difficulty. They filter out experience under the guise of “fit,” and then wonder why they keep relearning the same lessons.
Too senior is not a skill gap. It’s a signal that the system hasn’t matured enough to use what’s available to it.
For anyone hearing this message, here’s the reframe that matters. If you’re being labeled “too senior,” it doesn’t mean you’re behind. It means you’ve outgrown frameworks that equate leadership with novelty and adaptability with silence.
Your experience is not excess. It is not outdated. And it is not the problem. The problem is a narrow definition of value that cannot hold both depth and growth at the same time.
Experience doesn’t close doors on its own. Doors close when organizations mistake context for threat. And that mistake is not yours to carry.
If being labeled “too senior” has made you question how your experience is being read, you don’t have to navigate it alone.
This explores what’s really happening when experience is reframed as risk and how to communicate your value without shrinking it.
You are not overqualified. Your experience is not the problem.
Let’s talk through what this shift looks like for you.