Your Experience Is Losing Value
Twenty-year skills are aging in months. Here is how to tell where you stand.
In 1983, while on a short hectic trip to India, I spent three weeks flat on my back. It was freaky. Two slipped discs. I could not move. Then, days later, on crutches at the JFK airport on the way home, my brother-in-law told us our house had had a fire while we were away. Uninhabitable. What came after was six months of pain, no income, and a stack of rejection letters that got taller every week. There was a wife and a small child, and me flat on my back reading want ads.
This was the typewriter era. I typed every resume myself, carbon copies and all, and walked them to the mailbox. There was one safe option sitting on the table, a standing offer to go back to a firm I had already quit. One afternoon I actually picked up the landline to take it, because going backward felt like the only grown-up thing to do with a family depending on me.
The phone rang before I finished dialing.
It was a partner at one of the “Big Eight” accounting firms, apologizing for taking a few extra weeks to answer a resume I had mailed and half forgotten, asking me to come in. That interview turned into the engagement that put me at the Big Eight, and five years later on Wall Street for the next eighteen years. I still think about the version of me who was one dial tone away from the other life. Yes, that was the dial tone era too!
Going backward was the sensible move on paper. The only reason the new life happened is that I kept typing while I waited.
You are closer to that phone than you think.
The pressure looks different in 2026. Gartner says forty percent of business software will be running on AI agents by the end of this year, up from under five. Skill that took a decade to build is getting repriced in a couple of quarters. Your clients want a real point of view on tools that did not exist two years ago, and the people they are asking have twenty-plus years invested in the way it used to work.
So you hold. You lean on the track record and stay close to the people who already trust you, and you wait for it to settle. From the outside it looks like steadiness. I have sat across from enough senior leaders to tell you it is more often a crouch, and almost nobody names it in a leadership meeting.
Here is a question that stings. What have you learned in the last ninety days that was not in your playbook two years ago? Name one thing. A tool you now use every week. A client problem you could size up today that would have stumped you last year. If the honest answer is something vague about staying current and reading a lot, that is the crouch talking.
Here is where to start, and it is smaller than the fear makes it. Pick the one tool your clients keep bringing up. Block two hours this week and use it on a real problem from your own desk, start to finish, done badly. Not a course or a demo. A real piece of work you would have handled the old way. Then do it again next week.
Just 30 days of that and something turns. You stop nodding along and start carrying a point of view a person half your age cannot fake, because it rides on twenty years of judgment they do not have yet. The machine can reprice judgment that sits still. Put yours in motion against the new tools and it compounds instead.
In 1983 it was one resume at a time. In 2026 it is one real problem and one new tool, a week at a time.
You can run this on your own. If you want to move faster and skip the flailing, that is what a conversation with me is for.
Book a free discovery call with me.
Or, DM me on LinkedIn.
Raju Panjwani
Founder of Live Masterminds, Inc. | Former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. I work with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, mostly on seeing themselves clearly enough to lead through what is coming.