“I was told I was too experienced. Turns out, that was the wrong room.”

Margaret T. 58, Sydney, NSW | Former Head of Operations, financial services

Margaret spent 22 years in financial services operations, the last eight of them as a head of department for a mid-sized super fund. She was good at the work, genuinely good and she knew it. When the fund merged with a larger organisation and her role was restructured, she was offered a severance package and shown the door in the same meeting.

“I did not see it coming. That was the strange part. I had been building something for eight years. I thought I was protected by how much I knew.”
— Margaret

The six months that followed were not what she had expected. Margaret had assumed she would be back in a similar role within two or three months, she had the experience, the track record, and the network. What she encountered instead was a hiring market that consistently coded her seniority as a cost problem and her age as a culture risk, without anyone saying so directly.

The turning point

Margaret applied for 14 roles in her first three months. She made it to final interviews for four of them and was told she was “overqualified” for three. The fourth offered a role two levels below where she had been, at a salary she had earned twelve years earlier.

She turned it down, a decision she describes as one of the hardest and most important of her professional life.

“Accepting that role would have told me something I did not want to believe about myself. That I had to shrink to fit what they had available. I was not ready to believe that.”

Instead, she reached out to three former colleagues she had not spoken to in years, had honest conversations about what she was looking for, and discovered that two of them had left corporate roles and were running consulting practices. One of them invited her to work on a project.

What she built

That project became Margaret’s first consulting engagement. Over the following 18 months, she built a small practice advising superannuation funds on operational efficiency, the same work she had done inside organisations, now done for them from the outside.

She is now working with three clients simultaneously, billing at a rate that exceeds her former salary on fewer hours. She has turned down two approaches from organisations wanting to hire her full-time.

“The irony is not lost on me. The organisations that would not interview me are now paying me consulting rates to solve their problems. The difference is that I showed up as an expert with a practice, not as a job seeker with a gap on my CV.”

What she knows now

Margaret is direct about what she would do differently. She would have started conversations with her former network much earlier, before the redundancy, not after. She would have been less focused on finding a replica of her old role and more open to the question of what she actually wanted the next chapter to look like.

She would also have taken the identity piece more seriously, earlier. The loss of the title and the team and the daily structure of a senior role was harder than she had anticipated and she wishes she had known that was normal before she went through it.