After 45, how can experience become a real professional advantage?

The click came from the repetition of the same mechanism, observed for over twenty years in my own professional life. As a manager, I noticed that it was often much easier to obtain a promotion, an award, or exceptional recognition for an employee at the beginning of their career. For the more experienced ones, their performance seemed to be considered more as normal, almost expected. I also measured to what extent managing employees more experienced than oneself could be demanding. It requires enough self-confidence not to feel threatened by their experience, but also enough confidence in one’s organization to entrust them with real responsibilities and continue to invest in them. Upon returning from a round-the-world trip with my family, I found several professionals I had always admired. Some were going through very delicate professional situations. I told myself that something made no sense: how could such brilliant people see their value so brutally called into question? We have associated potential with youth, while careers are lengthening and the demographic revolution is unprecedented. The devaluation of experience is therefore a social issue, but also an immense economic one. I did not create Knowldy to fix experienced professionals. I created it to fix the gaze our society casts upon their potential.

There is no perfectly unified definition of the word "senior." France Travail itself indicates that, in the labor market, responses generally vary between 45 and 50 years old. Apec supports so-called senior executives from 55, but intervenes as early as 45 in a preventive mid-career logic. Certain France Travail programs also use precisely this threshold. Personally, I do not like the term "senior." If you ask on the street what a senior looks like, many will think of a very old person, perhaps dependent or living in a nursing home. This representation is radically far from that of the 45, 50, or 55-year-old professionals we are talking about: people in activity, with rich experience and still twenty years of career to build. Forty-five is therefore neither an identity nor a biological boundary. It is an age of intervention. It is the beginning, I do mean the beginning, of the second part of a career. We want to act before perspectives shrink, before access to training or mobility slows down, and before the professionals themselves begin to doubt their potential. We chose 45 not to confine people to their age, but to intervene early enough so that this second part of a career is chosen, prepared, and ambitious.

All the factors mentioned play a role, but in my opinion, they stem from a deeper problem: our conception of how a career unfolds. For decades, France used early departures and early retirements as an adjustment variable. At the end of the 1990s, more than 200,000 people were still compensated under early retirement schemes. We thus durably installed in companies and in minds the idea that at 55, the career was

almost over. The schemes have changed, but this representation remains. From 50 or 55, too many companies gradually stop investing: less training, less mobility, fewer visible projects, and sometimes exclusion from talent programs. The professionals themselves end up integrating the idea that their horizon is shrinking. It is absurd in a world where careers will be longer and longer and where four or five generations will work simultaneously. In 2024, the employment rate of 55-64 year-olds was still 60.3% in France, compared to 65.2% in the European Union and at least 75% in Germany. The French problem is therefore not only that of the pension system or the supposed cost of experienced profiles. It is our collective inability to imagine a second part of a career made of learning, mobility, ambition, and renewal.

We must obviously move away from slogans; wisdom does not come automatically with experience, any more than youth is automatically synonymous with innovation. Experience becomes an advantage when it is updated, mobilized, and put in complementarity with other skills. To measure its value, I look at three dimensions: what the company preserves, what it develops, and what it secures. It preserves critical skills, customer knowledge, the memory of decisions, and greater team stability. It develops the ability to solve complex problems more quickly, to help others grow, and to make teams more autonomous. Finally, it secures the quality of arbitrations, risk prevention, and avoided errors. The work of the OECD, based on comparable data from several countries, shows that a company whose proportion of employees over 50 is 10% higher than the average has a 1.1% higher productivity and a 4% lower turnover.

They also show that younger people are more productive when they work with more experienced colleagues. The value of experience is therefore measured very concretely: productivity, retention, customer satisfaction, speed of resolution, avoided errors, successful mobilities, and the ability to transform an idea into truly useful innovation.

Experience often produces an invisible economy. The role of companies is precisely to make it visible.

The different dimensions of Knowldy respond to the same objective: changing the gaze, supporting the development of experienced talents, and evolving company practices. The media acts on representations. It addresses experienced professionals, so that they continue to see themselves as talents in the making, but also the younger generations, who increasingly occupy decision-making positions. They must be able to feel perfectly at ease with the idea of recruiting, managing, and surrounding themselves with people who have more years of experience than they do. Our accelerator acts directly within companies. We design, with their funding, development programs intended for experienced talents, just as they have done for a long time for young talents. The objective is to take time to gain clarity, strengthen one’s posture and leadership, update one’s reading of a world upheaved by AI, technology, or geopolitics, nurture one’s network, and work on one’s visibility in order to prepare for an ambitious next move. We have also created a Next Placement offering, for leaders going through a pivotal moment. For a long time, they were called upon, desired, solicited. Then, sometimes, things go less well (and it happens even to the best). We prefer to speak of "next placement" rather than "outplacement": the word "out" already seems painful enough to us. Our method allows them to strengthen their confidence, clarity, and radiance and to choose what comes next. Finally, our conferences, workshops, and networking evenings bring these subjects very concretely into organizations. The media changes the narrative; the programs and experiences change trajectories and decisions.

We must refuse to choose between the two. Supporting experienced talents remains essential. After twenty or thirty years of career, many have never learned to tell their value, to make their transferable skills visible, or to use the new codes of recruitment. Helping them regain clarity, strengthen their network, and better express their contribution is legitimate. But one does not correct a system bias by only asking those who suffer from it to sell themselves better. Companies must also question their recruitment criteria, their talent pools, their access to training, and very subjective notions like "dynamism," "energy," or "cultural fit." They must measure at what point the applications or careers of experienced professionals begin to disappear. It is in this same desire to transform representations that Knowldy launched Les Révélations de l’Expérience, as a founding partner, with the energy and commitment of an exceptional collective. We want to highlight people over 45 who are experiencing an ascent, taking risks, innovating, entrepreneuring, or accessing new responsibilities. The objective is twofold: that experienced professionals look at themselves differently, but also that younger people look at them differently. That they see in them not people who have reached the end of their trajectory, but figures of success they might want to emulate. We must therefore simultaneously strengthen talents and transform the system that evaluates their value.

It is a subject I carry with particular sensitivity, after having worked for over twenty years in the technology sector, with enormous passion. I am deeply convinced that artificial intelligence can become a formidable tool for professional renewal for experienced talents. It allows one to learn faster, explore a new universe, test an idea, and transform business expertise into a new power of action. The value of AI does not lie solely in its ability to produce. It depends on the quality of the questions asked to it, the context provided to it, and our ability to judge its answers. Yet experience precisely brings discernment, an understanding of consequences, and a fine reading of human situations. A study published by MIT Press in 2024, covering thirty European and Asian countries, does not find any adverse effect of progress related to digital technologies, software, or robotization on older professionals. It invites us to question the idea that they would be less capable of appropriating new technologies. The danger would be for companies to reserve AI-related training and experiments for the employees they consider their only talents of the future. They would then manufacture themselves the dropout they would then claim to observe. Artificial intelligence does not make experience obsolete. It can augment it. In a world where everyone will produce faster, knowing what deserves to be produced, why, and with what consequences will become even more precious.

We must move away from a conception of career organized around three phases: learning, performing, and then preparing for departure. A long career must be thought of as a succession of cycles. At several moments, a person must be able to learn, accelerate, change professions, return to expertise, undertake, or take on new responsibilities. Companies should institute around 40 or 45 a true professional investment meeting. Not an end-of-career preparation interview, but an ambitious conversation about the next twenty years: what skills to develop, what responsibilities to explore, what networks to strengthen, and what transformations to anticipate? They

must also measure access to training, promotions, strategic projects, talent programs, and mobility according to age. What is not measured remains invisible. Public authorities must, for their part, invest more in the prevention of professional breaks, facilitate access to training in the middle of the career, and strengthen the fight against age-related discrimination. The most revealing indicator would be the opportunity gap between ages. With comparable skills and results, the probability of being trained, received in an interview, recruited, promoted, or chosen for a mobility should not decrease from 45 or 50. The change will have truly taken place when a 52-year-old professional is spontaneously considered a talent to be developed, and not a risk to be managed.