Fifteen years sounds valuable.
And it can be.
But the number itself tells us surprisingly little.
Fifteen years doing what?
Solving which problems?
In what context?
Which parts of that experience still matter?
And which parts could become useful somewhere completely different?
I started thinking about this when I had to look at my own career without the comfort of familiar job titles.
Years of experience are easy to count. Transferable value is much harder.
The labour market is changing quickly enough that this distinction matters. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 employer survey found that organisations expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030.
So time served cannot be the whole measure.
Experience has to survive context change.
A process improvement skill learned in finance may become useful in HR operations.
Managing teams across countries may translate into global workforce work.
A reconciliation project may reveal strengths in transformation, controls, stakeholder management and system design that travel far beyond reconciliation itself.
This is where I think experienced professionals sometimes undersell themselves.
We describe experience through the containers it happened in:
the company.
the department.
the role.
the industry.
But the market may care much more about what can be extracted from those containers.
What problems can you solve?
What complexity can you handle?
What decisions can you make?
What knowledge travels?
What have you learned that remains useful when the environment changes?
That is market value and it is not fixed.
A skill can become more valuable because technology changes. Another can lose value because the work around it disappears. A previously ordinary combination of skills can suddenly become unusual and useful. Which means experience is not something we simply accumulate.
It needs to be decoded, updated and re-positioned.
That is why I no longer think the strongest career question is: How many years of experience do I have?
I would rather ask: Which parts of what I know can create value somewhere I have not used them yet?
Fifteen years may then become worth much more than fifteen years.
Or much less.
The number was never the interesting part.
