Experience that reads as a liability in the wrong posting

Thirty years of doing the work is an asset in some postings and a problem in others, and the listing rarely tells you which one you are looking at. That ambiguity is the actual difficulty. Not the experience.

Where it reads as valuable

Roles where the responsibilities involve judgement, ownership, or cleaning up something that is already broken. Postings that describe a problem rather than a stack. Smaller employers who need one person who has seen it before rather than a team of three who have not.

Where it reads as a problem

Postings built around a fixed salary band with a junior title, where being obviously above the band makes you a flight risk on paper. Roles written entirely as a list of current tools, where the filter is keyword matching and nothing else. Places advertising culture in a way that is really advertising an age.

You can usually tell these apart in ninety seconds of reading, but only if somebody actually reads them.

What is worth doing about it

Applying to fewer things, chosen better. The volume approach is worse for you than for anyone else, because your applications get sorted on the thing that is ambiguous rather than the thing that is strong, and a hundred applications into the wrong pile is a hundred confirmations of nothing.

What I do

I read the postings, throw out the ones that were never going to answer, and hand you a short list with the reason each one is on it. If a posting looks like one where your experience counts against you, I will tell you that rather than let you find out from the silence.

I cannot promise you a job or an interview, and you should be suspicious of anybody who does.