Why Your CV Was Never Built to Hold Your Decades of Wisdom

Why Your CV Was Never Built to Hold Your Decades of Wisdom The two-page CV is convenient for recruiters. It's also quietly designed to erase most of your working life. If you've got 30, 40, or 50-plus years of experience but the standard advice says only include the last 10 to 15 years, where do the other decades go? In this video, I make the case for killing off the CV entirely, and why the future of work is already moving past it. I explore: Why the CV was built for convenience, not wisdom and was designed around 6-to-15-second recruiter scans and keyword-matching applicant tracking systems that exclude you if you don't hit the right buzzwords. The real reason the 10 to 15 year rule exists: it's a built-in defence against age discrimination claims, which means it's also, by design, built to remove age.And with it, the very decades where your deepest wisdom accumulated. The cognitive science behind it: fluid intelligence (quick problem-solving) rises in early adulthood then declines, while crystallised intelligence meaning decades of knowledge and insight applied to real situations, keeps building into our 60s before plateauing. The current data: roughly 30 million Americans now run solo businesses with no employees, and 42% of solopreneurs are women, more than double the rate of men. Proof that many of us are already redesigning the world of work outside the CV entirely. Why the future of work is shifting from specialists to generalists. People who draw insight across disciplines, integrate different perspectives, and know the limits of what they know, exactly the kind of thinking that decades of varied experience builds. My own backstory as an example: accounts, law, business development, nonprofit work, astrology, psychology, technology, broadcasting, and publishing. A background no CV could ever hold, but one that makes me exactly the kind of generalist this moment calls for. If you're a boomer woman who has ever shrunk your own background to fit a job description, or wondered where the rest of your life went on paper, this one's for you. Let's talk in the comments: What have you come up against trying to re-enter the world of work? Have you ever quietly discarded decades of your own experience just to seem relevant? Are you with me on killing off the CV — or against me? I'd love to hear either way. Work with me? Book here: www.stan.store/bybreensamuels #BoomerWomen #FutureOfWork #CareerReinvention