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Episode 347 - Years of experience do not always translate into a convincing interview. I explore how to make your expertise clearer, prepare without sounding scripted, and recognize when interviewer bias is part of the problem.
A professional can spend 25 years becoming good at their work and still struggle to explain that work in a job interview. Asked about a difficult decision, they begin with the organizational history, describe the stakeholders, explain the constraints, and eventually reach the decision itself. By then, the interviewer may have stopped following. The candidate leaves knowing they had more to offer than the conversation revealed.
I see versions of this problem in my coaching practice. Experienced professionals often assume that preparation means finding more examples, anticipating more questions, and making sure nothing important is left out. Yet the difficulty is frequently one of selection: deciding what another person needs to understand, and making that understanding possible within a few minutes. More experience provides more material, but it does not automatically provide a clearer answer.
This was the challenge I wanted to explore with communication and vocal coach Helen von Dadelszen, whose background includes HR and recruitment. Our conversation raised a question that matters to candidates and employers alike: how much of what we call competence in an interview is actually the ability to communicate competence? Improving that ability can help someone progress. Confusing it with the whole of their professional value can lead employers to overlook capable people.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
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About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
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Episode 346 - As AI reshapes the workplace, experienced professionals face a new challenge: combining decades of expertise with emerging technological capabilities. Professor Jon Whittle explains why successful AI adoption depends on much more than technology, and what professionals over 40 can do to remain competitive.
Artificial intelligence is changing how organizations operate, what employers expect, and how professionals demonstrate their value. For experienced workers, the challenge is not to abandon decades of expertise, but to learn how to apply it in a workplace being redesigned around AI.
For professionals in their 40s, 50s and 60s, the conversation about artificial intelligence has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Every week brings another prediction about disappearing jobs, another announcement about AI agents performing sophisticated tasks, or another company explaining how technology will allow it to operate with fewer employees. For people who have spent decades building expertise, professional relationships and a reputation for delivering results, the uncertainty raises a legitimate concern: how much of that accumulated experience will employers value in five or ten years?
As a career coach working primarily with experienced corporate professionals, I see how this uncertainty affects people's confidence. Some are already looking for work after redundancy, while others are considering whether their current roles will remain relevant. Many understand that they need to learn about AI but are unsure what meaningful proficiency looks like, particularly when their professional strengths have traditionally been leadership, strategy, communication and organizational judgment rather than technology.
I recently revisited this question with Jon Whittle, an AI expert with more than three decades of experience, a former senior leader at CSIRO's Data61, and now a professor at Melbourne Business School. When we first spoke earlier this year, I was considerably more concerned about AI's implications for careers than he was. Several months later, despite significant advances in the technology, his position had not fundamentally changed.
What emerged from our conversation was a more useful way to think about career resilience. The biggest challenge for experienced professionals may not be that AI makes their expertise obsolete, but that employers increasingly expect them to combine that expertise with capabilities they have not yet developed. This is an important distinction because it shifts the conversation from defending an existing career to actively shaping its next stage.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
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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.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
Episode 344 - Career change after 40 does not have to mean abandoning everything you have built. In this conversation with Kate Dillon, we explore portfolio careers, small career experiments, transferable career capital and how to create more professional options without making an unnecessary leap.
There is a particular kind of career dissatisfaction I see frequently among experienced professionals. They are successful by conventional measures. They have seniority, expertise, a respectable salary and two or three decades of professional history behind them. Yet increasingly, they feel uneasy about the idea that the next ten or fifteen years of their working life should look much like the last ten or fifteen.
The problem is that many people interpret this uneasiness as evidence that something dramatic needs to happen. They imagine leaving their employer, retraining completely, launching a consultancy, buying a business or finally pursuing the idea they have been quietly carrying around for years. Then reality intervenes. There is a mortgage, children at university, aging parents, a lifestyle built around a certain income, and a professional reputation that took a long time to establish.
This is where the conversation about career change can become unnecessarily binary. Stay or leave. Corporate career or entrepreneurship. Employment or consulting. Security or freedom.
My conversation with Australian lawyer, strategist and entrepreneur Kate Dillon offered a much more useful possibility: perhaps the next stage of an experienced professional's career does not require abandoning what came before. It may instead involve building outward from it.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
Episode 243 - Salary is one of the most uncomfortable parts of the job search, especially when employers ask for expectations early in the process. In this episode, compensation consultant Matt McFarlane explains how companies think about pay, salary bands, job titles, negotiation, and what experienced professionals need to understand before naming a number.
Few moments in a job search create as much discomfort as the salary question. It often appears too early, too bluntly, and too impersonally. A candidate is completing an online application, still unsure whether the role is a genuine fit, and suddenly a form asks for salary expectations or current compensation. For experienced professionals, especially those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, that question can feel less like an administrative step and more like a trap.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
Episode 342 - What if confidence isn’t the thing holding you back? I’m sharing what I’m seeing in the job market right now, from executive presence and relatability to why being more human may be your biggest advantage in the age of AI.
Confidence has become one of the most common explanations experienced professionals give me when their careers stall.
“I need to be more confident.”
“I’ve lost my confidence.”
“I don’t think I come across confidently enough in interviews.”
I hear versions of these statements every week from people with 15 or 20+ years of professional experience. They have managed teams, delivered complex projects, advised executives and built careers that demonstrate considerable competence. Yet when they enter a job search or begin aiming for a more senior role, confidence suddenly becomes the diagnosis. Increasingly, I think we may be diagnosing the wrong problem.
The professionals who stand out today are not necessarily the people projecting the greatest certainty. Often, they are the ones who communicate with enough self-awareness to be credible, enough courage to be visible and enough humanity to be memorable. And in an employment market increasingly saturated with AI-assisted communication, those qualities may become considerably more valuable.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
Episode 341 - Financial stress can change how we assess risk, negotiate, job search and plan our next career move. Carrie Joy Grimes, founder and CEO of WorkMoney, joins me to discuss financial runway, career transitions, money anxiety and how to make better decisions when your income or employment suddenly feels uncertain.
When experienced professionals lose their jobs, one of the first questions I ask is not about their resume, LinkedIn profile or network. I ask about money. How long can you afford to be out of work? The answer matters because a job search conducted with six months of financial runway can look very different from one conducted with six weeks.
Financial stress has a way of turning a career decision into an emergency. Suddenly, the goal is no longer to find the right next role. It is to make the discomfort stop. That distinction came up repeatedly in my recent conversation with Carrie Joy Grimes, founder and CEO of WorkMoney, a U.S. nonprofit focused on helping working people improve their financial lives, and author of The Joy of Money: How to Do More With and Feel Better About Your Money, No Matter How Much You Have.
“Financial stress isn't a thing that we walk around saying, ‘I'm financially stressed right now,’” Grimes told me. Instead, she described it as something that gradually weighs on us until we become accustomed to operating under pressure. That pressure can have consequences well beyond our bank accounts.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
👉 Ready to take the next step in your career? Book a free Career Coaching Introductory Meeting with me.
👉 Join 5,000+ senior professionals getting actionable ideas to get your next job and take control of your career directly in their inbox
The people deciding your next role form an opinion about you before you ever apply. This conversation shows you how to shape it.
My guest is Vanessa Errecarte: marketing lecturer at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, consultant, and author of Valuable and Visible. She created one of the only for-credit MBA courses in personal branding in the United States, and she has a message for every senior professional who was taught that great work speaks for itself: the market stopped listening to silent excellence.
We talk about why decades of strong work can disappear from view after a redundancy, how recruiters and hiring managers now discover senior candidates before a resume is ever read, and what separates real authority from empty visibility on LinkedIn. Vanessa explains why the advice to simply post more backfires, and why helping people publicly beats talking about yourself.
You will also hear the practical layer: her formula for introducing yourself so people remember you, the difference between an influencer's job and yours, what AI can and cannot do for your thinking, and a minimum viable personal brand that takes 1 to 3 hours a week, starting with one LinkedIn post.
In this episode, career coach Renata Bernarde and UC Davis marketing lecturer Vanessa Errecarte argue that personal branding is about creating value for others rather than promoting yourself: senior professionals get remembered, referred, and recruited when they publicly help their audience solve problems, because visibility without earned trust produces no career results.
Your one thing this week: write one LinkedIn post using Vanessa's formula. Open with a short personal story, connect it to why it matters, then teach a framework of three to five steps your peers can use.
As I say at the close of this episode, your expertise can be recognized, remembered and recommended through a little bit of work on your part. Subscribe so next week's episode finds you.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
Ready to take the next step in your career? Book a free Career Coaching Introductory Meeting with me.
Episode 339 - I answer the seven LinkedIn questions my career coaching clients ask most often, from headlines and About sections to recruiter visibility, skills, posting, and making your profile support your next career move.
Most experienced professionals know LinkedIn matters. They know recruiters use it, hiring managers check it, and that former colleagues, board contacts, clients, and professional peers may look them up before making an introduction.
And yet, many still treat LinkedIn as a digital filing cabinet. A place to store job titles, dates, and old responsibilities. That is a missed opportunity.
Your LinkedIn profile is designed to be a record of where you have worked. It is a positioning tool. It should help the right people understand who you are, what you are known for, what problems you solve, and where you may be heading next.
This is especially important for professionals in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. By this stage, your career is usually more complex. You may have worked across sectors, held several leadership roles., and you may be changing direction. For example, you may be moving from executive work to board roles, from corporate to consulting, from one industry to another, or from full employment into a portfolio career. If that's the case, your career complexity can be valuable. But if your LinkedIn profile does not translate it clearly, it can become confusing.
That is why Episode 339 of The Job Hunting Podcast focuses on the seven LinkedIn questions my clients ask me most often. These are not questions from people who lack experience. They are questions from people who often have a lot of experience, but are not sure how to make that experience visible, searchable, and relevant.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
Ready to take the next step in your career? Book a free Career Coaching Introductory Meeting with me.
Episode 338 - I answer the seven career questions my clients ask most often about visibility, CVs, achievements, career change, age bias, role choice, and career storytelling.
My clients don’t come to career coaching because they lack experience. They come because they are trying to make sense of that experience. They have done the work. They have led teams, managed complexity, navigated politics, influenced stakeholders, delivered projects, rebuilt systems, survived restructures, and made decisions under pressure.
But when they sit down to explain what they want next, the story often becomes unclear. This is especially true for experienced professionals – those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. By this stage, your career is rarely linear. You may have worked across sectors, changed functions, taken time out, held several leadership roles, been made redundant, moved countries, started consulting, returned to employment, or begun exploring board opportunities.
Your experience may be rich. But rich experience can also be hard to explain. That is why Episode 338 of The Job Hunting Podcast focuses on the seven broader career questions my clients ask me most often.
These are not LinkedIn questions. I will cover those in another episode. These are the bigger questions behind a job search, career transition, or professional reset. They are the questions that sit underneath the CV, the interview, the networking conversation, and the search strategy.
And if there is one idea I want you to take from this episode, it is this: Your experience does not speak for itself. You need to translate it.
Read the full Blog on the Website
Book a Free Introductory Meeting with Renata
Join 5,000+ Readers of The Job Hunting Newsletter: Subscribe Now
31 Days of Action for Job Seekers
Find Your Talents: Learn About Your Strengths, and Watch Your Career Grow
Lear More About Renata's career coaching and courses
Timestamps to guide your listening:
Links mentioned in this episode:
About the host, Renata Bernarde
Hello, I'm Renata Bernarde, the Host of The Job Hunting Podcast. I'm also an executive coach, job-hunting expert, and career strategist. I teach corporate, non-profit, and public professionals the steps and frameworks to help them find great jobs, change, and advance their careers with confidence and less stress.
Watch the Episodes on YouTube
Follow Renata on Social Media:
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