Your experience is not the problem. The way an old-school CV presents it might be.

There is something deeply strange about being told that the solution to having too much experience is to make yourself look like you have less.

And yet that is exactly the advice many midlife job seekers are hearing.

Stacey Duguid, 52, had spent more than a year looking for work after a long career in fashion and communications. She sent out application after application and got very little back. Then a friend suggested something fairly brutal.

Cut 20 years off the CV.

Take out the older roles.

Remove university dates.

Strip out the things that immediately tell someone how long you have been working.

Duguid later talked publicly about what was happening, and thousands of women responded with versions of the same story.

That should tell us something.

Not that every recruiter is ageist.

Not that every hiring algorithm is secretly rejecting people over 50.

But certainly that a lot of experienced women are looking at perfectly respectable careers and asking the same question:

The seven-year rewrite

This is where the idea gets interesting.

The advice Duguid says she received was to reduce the detailed career story to roughly seven years.

Seven.

I would not turn that into a magic rule.

More conventional CV advice often gives a wider recent-career window, depending on the seniority and relevance of the roles.

But I like seven as an experiment.

Because Gen X has a particular problem.

We were trained to believe experience accumulates value.

Twenty years is better than ten.

Twenty-five is better than fifteen.

Thirty years should surely make you irresistible.

Except sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes a long CV triggers an entirely different set of assumptions.

Too senior.

Too expensive.

Probably won't report to someone younger.

Might be difficult to manage.

Might not understand the new technology.

Might leave when something better appears.

Or, more simply:

Old.

That is the part nobody particularly enjoys saying out loud.

Your CV is not your autobiography

This is the mistake experienced professionals make all the time.

We think the job of the CV is to prove everything we have ever done.

It isn't.

The job of the CV is to make the next conversation happen.

That means the question isn't:

It is:

If an older role proves something important, keep it.

If it explains why you can solve a problem somebody else cannot, keep it.

If it is there because you are proud of having done it in 2003, maybe it belongs somewhere else.

You do not need to erase your career.

You need to stop making the recruiter excavate it.

And I say this as a former digital recruiter

Social Global Grind began in 2009, and I never really let it go. I continued building it in the background while my career evolved.

Then, in 2014, my first job after moving to New Zealand was in digital recruitment.

So I have sat on the other side of the CV.

I have looked at candidates and asked the question hiring people ask very quickly:

And there is something I think experienced professionals underestimate.

How you present your career tells me something about how you think.

A CV is not only a list of experience.

It is a piece of communication.

It tells me whether you can prioritise.

Whether you understand your audience.

Whether you can take complexity and make it clear.

Whether you understand what matters now.

And increasingly, whether you know how to operate in the environment you are trying to enter.

As a former digital recruiter, I would rather see an experienced candidate make an intelligent, modern decision about how to present themselves than send me three pages of chronology because that is what everybody did twenty years ago.

That could mean a traditional CV.

But it might also mean something more.

The clever CV might have two layers now

I would not send a highly designed CV into every applicant tracking system and hope for the best.

The machine still needs something clean to read.

So give it one.

A straightforward, ATS-friendly CV.

Clear headings.

Recent experience.

Relevant language.

No circus.

But alongside it?

That is where I think experienced professionals can get clever.

Create a second layer.

A simple personal webpage.

A clean HTML career portfolio.

A beautifully designed one-page career story.

A polished presentation built in Canva or another modern design tool.

A page showing selected projects, outcomes, case studies, testimonials and the different ways somebody could use your expertise.

Something you can link from the CV.

Something you can include in an application.

Something you can send after the first conversation.

Something you can put in your LinkedIn Featured section.

Something that might make somebody stop and say:

Because that is often the entire point.

Prompt the conversation.

There is a big difference between saying:

And demonstrating it before the interview has even started.

That could be particularly useful for people in marketing, design, communications, recruitment, technology, consulting, transformation, learning and development, leadership and other areas where communication and judgment are part of the work itself.

The career portfolio changes the question

The traditional CV asks:

A career portfolio asks:

That is a much better question for an experienced person.

One of the smartest shifts is moving away from the title a company gave you and toward the expertise you actually own.

A company might have called you:

Director of Communications.

Head of Talent.

Senior Marketing Manager.

General Manager.

Fine.

Those were titles you were given while you were there.

What expertise did you leave with?

Maybe:

Or:

Or:

That tells me much more.

Stop describing responsibilities. Show me what changed.

This is another place the traditional CV fails experienced people.

It says:

Responsible for managing a team of 12.

Responsible for overseeing campaigns.

Responsible for stakeholder engagement.

Responsible for strategy.

Fine.

That tells me what was written in the job description.

It tells me almost nothing about what happened because you were there.

Show me the change.

Did revenue increase?

Did costs fall?

Did customer retention improve?

Did you build the department?

Did you repair a broken process?

Did you win a major account?

Did you launch something?

Did you increase output?

Did you reduce errors?

Did you lead people through something difficult?

That is evidence.

And experienced professionals usually have far more evidence than they realise.

The problem is that we buried it under job titles and responsibilities.

The portfolio solves another Gen X problem

A lot of people in midlife are not necessarily trying to climb the same ladder anymore.

That matters.

You may not want another enormous corporate role.

You may want fractional work.

Consulting.

Advisory work.

Projects.

Three days a week.

Something more hands-on.

Something where you use the knowledge without carrying an entire department around on your back.

The traditional CV struggles with that because it is built around one assumption:

A portfolio can say something much more useful:

That is a completely different proposition.

It also makes networking more powerful.

When somebody asks, "What are you looking for?" you no longer have to give them a five-minute explanation of your career history.

Instead:

Now we have something to talk about.

This is not about pretending you are younger

There is a difference between presenting your career strategically and pretending twenty years of it never happened.

I do not think the answer to age discrimination should be:

That is ridiculous.

And insulting.

The goal is not to become younger.

The goal is to become clearer.

Your older experience should support the argument.

It should not become the argument.

That is the difference.

So what would I actually do?

I would create two things.

First, the CV.

Give the most recent seven to ten years the detail.

Keep older experience where it materially strengthens your case.

Move useful older work into an Earlier Career Highlights section.

Remove graduation dates unless they genuinely matter.

Remove outdated software.

Remove phrases like "25 years of experience."

Remove old conventions that date the document without adding value.

Then build the second layer.

Not a giant personal-brand website.

Not a TED Talk about yourself.

A doorway.

Who are you now?

What do you solve?

What have you actually delivered?

What proof do you have?

How can somebody work with you?

Add a few outcomes.

A case study.

A testimonial.

A project.

A useful piece of thinking.

And if HTML, Canva, AI-assisted design or another modern tool lets you present that experience more intelligently, use it.

Gen X knows how to create a space where one did not already exist.

Do it here too.

Act as an experienced executive recruiter, CV strategist and career portfolio editor.
I am an experienced professional and I want to modernise my CV without erasing the value of my earlier career.
My goal is to communicate what I can do now, reduce unnecessary age signals and position me clearly for the work I want next.
I will paste my current CV and the job description below.
1. Create a seven-to-ten-year version of my CV.
Give detailed space to the most recent 7 to 10 years. Keep an older role only where it materially strengthens my case for this specific opportunity.
2. Create an Earlier Career Highlights section.
Condense older experience into a short section containing only achievements, expertise or credibility that still matters now.
3. Identify unnecessary age signals.
Flag graduation dates, outdated technology, old-fashioned CV conventions, excessive chronology, phrases such as "25 years of experience," and anything else that signals age without adding useful evidence.
Do not fabricate information or conceal information where dates or qualifications are required.
4. Rewrite my opening positioning statement in first person.
Explain what I actually do, who I help, the problems I solve and the results I create.
Avoid generic phrases such as "results-driven professional," "seasoned executive" and "proven track record."
5. Replace responsibilities with outcomes.
Rewrite job-duty language as evidence of what changed because I was there.
Use measurable outcomes only when I provide evidence. If a useful number is missing, tell me what I should look for rather than inventing one.
6. Compare my CV with the job description.
Identify relevant experience, terminology, tools and capabilities that genuinely match the opportunity but are missing or buried.
7. Check for an overqualification problem.
If my background could make me appear too senior, too expensive or likely to leave, help me explain why this next move makes sense without diminishing my experience or sounding defensive.
8. Build my career portfolio.
Create a five-section outline:
The expertise I own
What I do for organisations or clients
Proof and measurable outcomes
Selected career experience
Ways to work with me
Suggest evidence, case studies, work examples or testimonials I could add.
9. Recommend the best presentation format.
Based on my industry and target role, recommend whether my portfolio should be a simple webpage, HTML portfolio, Canva presentation, PDF portfolio, LinkedIn Featured portfolio or another appropriate format.
Keep my primary CV ATS-friendly. Treat the visual portfolio as the complementary second layer, not a replacement for an application document where a CV is required.
10. Make the presentation itself demonstrate modern capability.
Suggest one intelligent way I could make the application more memorable without making it gimmicky.
At the end, give me:
A. Revised CV
B. Five things you removed or reduced and why
C. Missing proof or metrics I should find
D. Career portfolio outline
E. Recommended portfolio format
F. One idea that could prompt a recruiter conversation
G. A 40-word LinkedIn About statement
Here is my current CV:
[PASTE CV]
Here is the job description or type of work I want:
[PASTE JOB DESCRIPTION]

The part I do not want Gen X to miss

We have spent our whole careers learning new things.

New software.

New platforms.

New systems.

Now AI.

Fine.

Maybe one more thing has changed.

How we present the career itself.

The old CV rewarded chronology.

The next version of work may reward clarity, proof, judgment and the ability to show somebody what you can do before they hire you.

So no, your 25 years of experience are not worthless.

Quite the opposite.

They may be too valuable to keep presenting as a list of job titles.

It is just one way of explaining it.

And Gen X has never been particularly bad at reinventing the format.