Being Overqualified Taught Me I Had Been Measuring Myself Wrong

I had spent four years in a specialised project management role at a large infrastructure firm in Delhi and by 29, when I began looking for a change, had a CV that was precise and deep and that I was proud of.

The problem, which I discovered over three months of job searching, was that my experience was specific in a way that did not fit neatly into the roles available at comparable levels.

I was either overqualified for the roles that were roughly my level - because my specific domain was more senior than the general level of the role suggested - or underqualified for the more senior roles because I lacked the breadth the seniority required.

Recruiters used the word overqualified with a frequency that began to affect me in a way I had not expected. I had understood overqualified to mean too experienced, which sounds like a problem it is pleasant to have.

What I discovered it actually meant, in most of the conversations I was having, was too specific - that my depth in one area had come at the cost of breadth that the hiring market valued more than the depth I had.

I had, in other words, been measuring my professional growth by a metric - depth of expertise - that the external market was measuring differently. This was uncomfortable because the depth had been genuinely earned and I was proud of it.

What I eventually understood, with the help of an honest conversation with a former manager who had navigated a similar transition, was that overqualified was not a verdict on my value but a description of a misalignment between what I had built and what was being asked for.

The solution was not to make myself look less experienced - a common and generally bad advice given to overqualified candidates. It was to reframe the depth as exactly the capability the right role needed, and to be more selective about which roles those were.

I found a role at 30 that was genuinely the right size for what I had built. The search took longer than my earlier job searches had, and the role required me to accept that the right fit was not always at the title level I had been targeting.

The lesson I carry is about building professional capability with some attention to its market legibility, not just its intrinsic depth.