When Experience Becomes a Liability Instead of an Asset
For most of my career, experience was my currency.
It opened doors.
It anchored decisions.
It gave me credibility before I ever spoke.
I spent 37 years building that experience—decades in aviation and aerospace, navigating complexity, risk, certification, leadership, and change. I worked my way into senior roles. My last three positions were vice president roles. I carried responsibility, accountability, and institutional trust.
Experience wasn’t just something I had.
It was something organizations relied on.
Until suddenly, it wasn’t.
After the company I worked for went out of business, I expected the transition to be difficult. I did not expect it to be destabilizing in the way it was.
I was unemployed for 11 months.
Eleven months of sending resumes.
Eleven months of interviews that went nowhere.
Eleven months of being told—explicitly and implicitly—that my experience was somehow too much.
I applied for roles I was perfectly suited for.
I applied for roles I had already done.
I applied for roles I was significantly overqualified for.
And still, nothing moved.
At first, I assumed it was the market. Then the timing. Then the usual explanations we give ourselves when something doesn’t make sense. But as the months passed, a harder truth began to surface.
My experience wasn’t opening doors anymore.
It was closing them.
I could feel it in interviews.
In the subtle pauses.
In the polite deflections.
In the comments about being “very senior” or “bringing a lot of perspective.”
Perspective, it turns out, is not always welcome.
There’s a point in many people’s careers where experience quietly crosses an invisible line. Where it stops being seen as an asset and starts being read as a risk.
Too expensive.
Too opinionated.
Too set in your ways.
Too close to retirement.
Too hard to manage.
No one says these things outright.
They don’t have to.
I sent out more resumes than I can count. Each one tailored. Each one honest. Each one backed by decades of proof that I knew how to do the work—and lead others through it.
And still, I waited.
What made it harder wasn’t just the rejection. It was the dissonance.
I hadn’t suddenly become less capable.
I hadn’t lost my judgment.
I hadn’t forgotten how to lead.
But the system was treating me as if my experience was something to be worked around instead of leveraged.
Eventually, practicality won.
Bills don’t care about titles.
Mortgages don’t pause for identity crises.
Groceries don’t accept résumés as payment.
So I accepted a job at a much lower level.
A role I was overqualified for.
A role I had outgrown years earlier.
A role I took not because it reflected my capability, but because it provided a paycheck.
I told myself it was temporary.
I told myself it was a bridge.
I told myself I would figure it out once I was back inside.
And in many ways, that was true.
But there was also grief in that decision.
Grief for the version of my career that made sense on paper.
Grief for the expectation that experience would be valued, not penalized.
Grief for the quiet recalibration of identity that happens when you accept less—not because you want to, but because you have to.
Here’s what we don’t talk about enough.
When experienced people take roles below their capability, it’s often framed as a personal choice or a lifestyle decision. Flexibility. Balance. Stepping back.
That narrative erases the reality.
Many people aren’t stepping back.
They’re stepping down to survive.
And the cost isn’t just financial.
It’s psychological.
You begin to second-guess what you know.
You become careful about how much you reveal.
You edit your language.
You downplay your past so it doesn’t feel threatening.
You learn to carry your experience quietly.
Returning to corporate life in this way has been illuminating—and unsettling.
I’ve seen how often wisdom goes unused.
How frequently insight is ignored.
How many problems are being solved the hard way because the people who’ve seen them before aren’t being asked.
We talk endlessly about knowledge transfer and mentorship, yet we routinely sideline the very people who could provide it.
Experience is treated like excess inventory instead of strategic capital.
Ageism doesn’t usually arrive loudly.
It shows up as hesitation.
As “culture fit” concerns.
As assumptions about adaptability.
As surprise when you learn something new quickly.
It shows up when your résumé signals longevity instead of potential.
And yet, the irony is hard to miss.
Organizations complain about:
lack of leadership maturity
repeated mistakes
short-term thinking
fragile cultures
All while quietly filtering out people who have lived through cycles, failures, recoveries, and change.
Experience doesn’t make you obsolete.
It makes you contextual.
It allows you to see patterns instead of just moments.
To anticipate consequences instead of reacting to them.
To slow decisions just enough to ask better questions.
When experience becomes a liability, it’s not because it lost value.
It’s because the system stopped knowing how to use it.
Being back inside corporate life now, I see this more clearly than ever.
There are rooms where my experience is invisible until something goes wrong.
There are moments where foresight is dismissed as caution.
There are decisions being made that feel familiar—for all the wrong reasons.
I don’t write this to position myself as a victim.
I write it because this is happening to far too many women.
People who have given decades to their industries.
People who have led, built, stabilized, and delivered.
People who are suddenly treated as “too much” when they are, in fact, exactly what’s needed.
We need to stop pretending this is an individual problem.
This is a systemic failure.
A failure to value depth.
A failure to recognize wisdom.
A failure to imagine leadership beyond novelty and speed.
When experience becomes a liability, everyone loses.
Not just the people who are forced to shrink themselves to stay employed—but the organizations that will eventually learn, the hard way, what that experience was worth.
After now 39 years, I know this much.
My experience did not suddenly lose its value.
The system lost its ability to recognize it.
And that distinction matters more than ever.
If your depth once created opportunity and now feels harder to place, you are not imagining it.
Download: When Experience Stops Opening Doors
A grounded guide for experienced women navigating moments when experience is treated as excess instead of value.
And if you want support clarifying what comes next, book a strategy session to talk through how to move forward without shrinking your experience.