Your Experience Is Not Your Value: How to Explain What You Really Bring

Episode 345 - After decades of work, many experienced professionals can describe what they have done but struggle to explain why it matters now. This episode explores how understanding your value, rather than relying on titles, credentials and experience alone, can change the way you approach job searches, career transitions and the next stage of your working life.

One of the hardest career questions for an experienced professional should, in theory, be one of the easiest: What is your value?

After 20, 25, or 30 years of work, there is plenty of evidence to draw from. You have qualifications, projects, promotions, difficult problems solved, teams led, budgets managed, relationships built, and lessons learned the hard way. Yet in my work as a career coach, I regularly meet accomplished professionals who struggle to explain why any of this should matter to the person sitting across from them in a job interview.

The problem is rarely a lack of experience. More often, they have confused experience with value.

That distinction became the central idea in my recent conversation with Helen Palmer, creator of value(x) hub and the broader Self unLimited approach to working life. Helen argues that value is not a fixed characteristic we accumulate over a career. It is contextual, plural and dynamic. What one employer prizes, another may barely notice. What mattered enormously to us professionally at 35 may matter considerably less at 55.

“Value is in the eye of the beholder,” Helen told me.

For experienced professionals, this idea is more challenging than it first appears. It means that having impressive credentials, a senior title, or a long track record does not automatically make our contribution relevant to the next opportunity. It also means we cannot outsource the work of interpreting our experience to employers and expect them to reach the conclusion we hoped for.

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