Live Without an Expiration Date

For twenty years, “I work in tech” was the career equivalent of a permanent parking spot — stable, a little smug, and always close to the good snacks. Then the layoffs came. Then the “AI efficiency” memos came. Then the second round of layoffs came. Now a lot of sharp, seasoned tech professionals are staring at a job market that no longer recognizes the rules they mastered.

In this episode, Rich breaks down why the tech job — long considered the most future-proof contract in the American workforce — is behaving like every other broken contract we’ve covered on this show: retail, manufacturing, financial services, media. He walks through what’s actually happening in tech hiring right now, why “just learn to code” was always a half-truth, and how the skills tech professionals already have translate directly into industries that still run on people showing up, solving problems, and shaking hands — including plenty of brick-and-mortar businesses that would kill for someone who thinks in systems.

Expect some self-deprecating detours about Rich’s own track record of confidently walking into rooms he didn’t fully understand, a practical framework for translating “tech speak” into plain business value, and an honest look at the identity work nobody warns you about when your job title stops being a personality trait.

Runtime: ~30 minutes

You’ll learn:

* Why tech’s employment contract broke the same way manufacturing’s and retail’s did — and why tech workers were told it couldn’t happen to them

* The three tech skills that translate almost anywhere, and the two that quietly expire

* How to talk about your experience without sounding like you’re still trying to get funding for a Series A

* A field guide to industries — many of them decidedly non-digital — that are hungry for exactly what displaced tech people carry

* Why “brick-and-mortar” doesn’t mean “backward,” and why that assumption might be the thing costing you the interview

Who this is for: Tech professionals in their 40s, 50s, and 60s navigating layoffs, stalled searches, or the quiet dread of watching their role get “restructured.” Also for anyone who’s ever updated a resume at 11 p.m. and wondered if they’ve become a legacy system.

Everybody wants the highlight reel: fired at 52, landed the role, redemption arc, roll credits. This episode is the expensive, occasionally funny truth about everything that happened in between — and it runs long, because the real story didn’t fit in a tidy soundbite.

I walk through my own career-transition case study — a twenty-year entrepreneur who had to fire-sell his own business, then lost a director role to an acquisition, then got caught in the dot-com crash, and the three years it took to land the credit union role that became an eight-year career. We break down:

* The three moves that ate most of two years and felt like progress but weren’t — the mass-application “job board casino,” the credential chase, and the coffee-chat grievance tour

* The four pivots that actually worked in about eight months, once I finally tried them

* What I’d skip entirely if I had to start over tomorrow

* Why the job that felt “beneath me” turned into the best career decision I made

If you’re in the middle of your own gap right now — the real one, not the version you post about — this episode is for you. No inspirational fluff. Just what actually worked, what wasted time, and what to do differently starting this week.

Runtime: ~30 minutes - Host: Rich Jones, Live Without an Expiration Date

Nobody ages you out faster than you do. Sure, there’s plenty of ageism coming from the outside — HR departments who think “digital native” is a job requirement, hiring managers who see “25 years of experience” and read “expensive and set in his ways.” But the version of ageism that does the most damage is the one nobody else can see: the running commentary in your own head that starts narrating your birthdays like a countdown clock instead of a scoreboard.

In this episode, Rich takes on the ageism you inflict on yourself — the “I’m too old to pivot,” the “that ship has sailed,” the quiet self-editing that happens before anyone else even gets the chance to underestimate you. Expect some hard truths, some Marine Corps bluntness, a fair amount of Rich making fun of his own age awareness, and a practical framework for catching the ageist thoughts before they catch you. If you’ve ever caught yourself saying “at my age...” right before talking yourself out of something you actually wanted to do, this one’s for you.

In this episode:

* Why the loudest ageist in your career is usually you

* The four phrases that are secretly self-imposed expiration dates

* How to tell the difference between “wisdom” and “excuse”

* A field-tested framework for catching the thought before it becomes the belief

* Why Rich thinks his own internal ageism sounds suspiciously like a bicyclist who thinks he’s too old only to find out he isn’t.

Runtime: ~30 minutes

You showed up. Every day, for years. You didn’t job-hop, didn’t play games, didn’t hold the organization hostage every review cycle. You were the dependable one.

And somewhere along the way, that became the problem.

In this episode, Rich breaks down the quiet, unspoken shift that happens when an organization stops seeing your loyalty as an asset and starts treating it as a guarantee — the moment they stop investing in you because they’ve already decided you’re not going anywhere. We’ll talk about how to spot the signs before your paycheck does, why “dependable” can become a career-ending label, and what to do if you realize you’ve already crossed the line. Bring your coffee. This one’s going to sting a little before it helps.

Runtime: ~30 minutes

Your new boss wasn’t born when you got your first performance review. She’s sharp, she’s fair, and every time she says “let’s circle back,” some small, petty part of you wants to explain what circling back looked like before Slack existed. This episode is about that part of you — the ego mechanics of reporting to someone with less tenure or experience than you — and how to actually get good at it instead of just white-knuckling through it. Rich unpacks the specific triggers (the language gap, the “I trained people like you” reflex, the credibility math your brain keeps running in the background), tells on himself for failing this exact test, and lays out a real playbook for turning tenure into leverage instead of resentment. If you’ve ever caught yourself starting a sentence with “back when I was doing your job,” this one’s for you.

Runtime: ~30 minutes Themes: ego, authority, career disruption, leading from behind, credibility, humility that actually works

For the first half of your career, one good mentor can carry you. They know the industry, they know you, they open a door or two, and that’s enough. Then you hit your 40s or 50s, and something breaks. The one-mentor model — the wise senior person who has all the answers — stops working, not because mentors got worse, but because your problems got more complicated than any one person’s experience can cover.

In this episode, Rich Jones makes the case for retiring the search for “the one” and building a personal board of directors instead — three or four people, each doing a different job, none of them expected to be everything. Rich breaks down the four seats every board like this needs, explains why his own one-mentor era quietly expired somewhere around year eighteen, and gives you a blunt, no-worksheet-required way to figure out who’s already sitting in your life waiting to be formally invited onto the board. Funny in places, uncomfortable in others, useful throughout.

In this episode:

* Why the “wise elder” mentor model was built for a career that doesn’t exist anymore

* The four seats on a personal board — and why you probably already have someone in two of them

* How to ask someone to be on your board without it turning into a weird proposal

* The single biggest reason boards fail: nobody ever tells anyone they’re on it

* A field-tested way to keep four relationships alive without turning into everyone’s needy friend

Runtime: ~30 minutes

Everybody tells you to “be yourself” in an interview, right up until the interview actually starts, at which point most of us turn into a nervous impression of a LinkedIn headline. In this episode, Rich Jones makes the case that authenticity isn’t just a nice-to-have in job searches and workplace conversations — it’s a genuine competitive advantage, especially for experienced professionals competing against candidates and colleagues who all sound suspiciously alike. Drawing on his own Marine Corps background, thirty-plus years in credit unions, a decade-long career gap, and a fair number of interviews and boardroom conversations he’d rather forget, Rich breaks down why the polished, safe version of you loses to the honest version of you more often than you’d think — whether you’re across the table from a hiring manager, pushing back on your boss, or navigating a tense conversation with a peer. Expect some self-inflicted embarrassment, a rifle inspection that went badly, and a practical framework for bringing your real self into the rooms where it matters most.

**Runtime:** ~30 minutes

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

We’ve been taught that imposter syndrome is a problem to fix — a glitch in confidence that needs to be silenced before you can lead, interview, or negotiate like you belong in the room. Rich Jones disagrees. In this episode of Live Without an Expiration Date, Rich makes the case that imposter syndrome isn’t a malfunction — it’s data. It shows up precisely at the moments you’re being honest about the size of the challenge in front of you, and if you learn to read it instead of run from it, it becomes one of the most reliable tools you have for building real authenticity, both in a job search and inside the job itself.

Drawing on his own decade-long career disruption and three decades in financial services leadership, Rich walks through what imposter syndrome actually is (and isn’t), why it hits hardest at 40+ during career transitions, and a practical framework for using it as a diagnostic rather than a disqualifier. You’ll hear how to bring this into interviews without oversharing, how to use it to write a resume that doesn’t sound like everyone else’s, and how to lead a team without pretending you have it all figured out — because you don’t, and neither does anyone else in the room.

If you’ve ever sat outside a conference room telling yourself you don’t belong in there, this episode is for you.

In this episode:

* What imposter syndrome actually is, and why the “just be confident” advice misses the point

* Why imposter syndrome intensifies during mid-career disruption and reinvention

* The reframe: imposter syndrome as a diagnostic signal, not a disqualifying verdict

* How to use it to differentiate yourself in a job search instead of hiding it

* How to use it on the job to lead and communicate with more credibility, not less

* A composite story from Rich’s coaching work

* A concrete, one-week challenge to practice this before your next interview or team meeting

Runtime: ~30 minutes

Last episode was about the audit — figuring out where AI has quietly exposed a skill you thought was still current. This one’s about what you do after you’ve run it, if you’re the person in the room whose job is now to lead with these tools instead of just personally keep up with them.

This week, Rich talks to mid-career executives specifically — the ones who aren’t worried about being replaced by AI, they’re worried about something closer and harder to see: leading a team through AI adoption without the whole thing turning into either blind trust or reflexive resistance. He walks through the actual job of an executive in this moment — not producing faster, but deciding better — the two failure modes he’s watching leaders fall into right now, and a decision framework for knowing when AI’s answer is good enough to act on and when it needs a human to slow down and actually think.

If your job title has “chief,” “director,” or “VP” in it, and you’ve been quietly wondering whether your value just went down because a tool got faster than your team, this episode is the other half of that question.

You’ve done everything right. Two decades of solid performance, a resume full of results, a network you’ve built for years. So why is the job search taking longer and hurting more than it did when you were starting out?

In this episode, Rich breaks down what actually changes about job searching once you’re mid-career — and what to do about it. This isn’t generic “update your LinkedIn headline” advice. It’s a practical, no-fluff playbook for repositioning your experience, working a network that’s gone quiet, cracking modern hiring systems that weren’t built with you in mind, and walking into interviews as the answer to a problem instead of a name on a stack of resumes.

If you’re 40-plus and back in the market — by choice or otherwise — this episode gives you the strategy and the mindset shift to search smarter, not just harder.

In this episode:**

· Why the mid-career job search is a different game than the one you learned in your 20s and 30s

· How to audit and reposition your value proposition before you touch your resume

· The network activation sequence that actually generates leads (not just “reach out to people”)

· How ATS systems and AI screening actually work, and how to stop losing to them

· Addressing age bias directly instead of pretending it doesn’t exist

· How to walk into interviews positioned as a solution, not a candidate

Runtime: ~30 minutes