Started working late in my life. How to make it not sound bad?

Question

I'm from a country where its not unusual to have 'informal' jobs. We make money, don't pay taxes, its easy to get one. But later it comes back and bite us back.

I'm 38 years old and applying for a position to work abroad, so I can not just say these things and expect them to believe.

How can explain in my CV that I only had 2 jobs, with 5 years experience each?

Can I turn the fact that I don't jump from job to job every couple years (which is also common around here) into something good?

Also, i was writing an 'About me' text to quickly introduce myself before diving into details.
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Like many in the IT field, i'm self taught in several areas, acquiring technical knowledge through work experience.

In the past decade I've been actively working with the following technologies, both in Windows and Linux environments:

• dns: dnsmasq
• load balancing: haproxy
• log auditing: elastic, logstash, kibana, rsyslog
• mail: cyrus, postfix, zimbra
• monitoring: zabbix
• orchestration: puppet, hiera, vsphere
• packages/keys: apt-mirror, reposync, sks
• web server/proxy: apache, nginx

As any IT Analyst knows, scripting is a big deal in our daily routine. To perform and automate tasks in hundreds of VMs i had to learn at least the basics of many script languages, like:

• bash/sh
• javascript/jquery
• php
• python
• ruby
• vba/vbs

Besides the work experience mentioned above, the workplace experience i gained working for those companies helped me develop non-technical skills like:

• commercial awareness: studying and understanding how the businesses work
• maturity: being able to see the world out of my own bubble
• problem-solving: with the experience comes the chance to be proactive
• self-reliance: you can trust me to finish a task independently
• teamwork: we all have our limits, and team members can help and rely on each other for support and guidance

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Forgot to mention a few things that might be relevant:

• I do know everything I put in my resume. I never lied.
• both jobs were/are very well paid and in big companies (10,000 employees)
• in the first one they offered all training necessary to work in the IT Security field
• the second one trained me to work with infrastructure

Answer 1

I'm from a country where its not unusual to have 'informal' jobs. We make money, don't pay taxes, its easy to get one.

Why is this a problem from a resume perspective? Resumes don't usually include information about whether you paid your taxes. Are you afraid of your government reading it and collecting back taxes from you?

How can explain in my CV that i only had 2 jobs, with 5 years experience each?

It depends on where overseas you are applying, but as long as you can otherwise fill the space, it's not expected for the applicant to list all their past jobs.

I've had 8 jobs in my life. Only 4 are currently listed.

I am not sure this is a concern or something you need to address before you are certain it is a problem.

Answer 2

How to make it not sound bad?

Why do you assume it'll be bad? What matters is your claim about your knowledge and expertise and whether you're able to produce results / exhibit capabilities in the interview.

How can explain in my CV that i only had 2 jobs, with 5 years experience each?

That's an information, and needs to explanation. Yes, if you have a long gap between two jobs, you may need to explain why that gap is there and what you did during that time - but otherwise, the fact that you had two jobs, 5 years each, needs no explanation.

Started working late in my life. How to make it not sound bad?

Your age, has nothing to do with your overall experience. Many people change their career track for multiple reasons, like boredom, late realization, disabilities - there are many reasons. Unless the job you are applying for has a requirement for certain age (or range), it usually does not matter.

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EDIT:

As you asked in comments:

I'm worried about questions like "what did you do before?" or "why did you start working so late in your life?" but there is no gap between the jobs.

Usually, that's none of their business (unless you were in Jail or something like that...), but if it's asked, tell them about your experience which you gathered from the part-time gigs. Every experience, however small it is, counts. It may not have direct connect with the technology / domain / industry, but each of them comes with some form of learning - punctuality, teamwork, efficiency, salesmanship - you'll surely find some positives from your previous job experiences to add to this.

Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to hide.

Answer 3

As a frame challenge, you're overthinking this.

• Potential employers usually won't know how old you are, unless you tell them. Someone who appears to be in their 30's and has 10 years of solid job history wouldn't really stand out from the pack. If the interviewer even thinks about your age, they might as well just assume you're 32 and started working at 22, fresh out of college.
• Many people only list the most recent, or most-relevant jobs on their resume. If someone does ask about what came before your 10 years of history, you can just say "I was working unrelated jobs." That's not really unusual in most cultures - many people work odd jobs (fast food, retail, factory work, call centers, etc.) before they find their first "professional" office job.
• In much of the world, age discrimination is illegal. You haven't told us where you're trying to move to, but, in the US for example, employers will generally hesitate to say anything even remotely related to age in an interview, for fear of being sued because of age discrimination. In other words, no one would ask you why you started working so late in life, even if they'd managed to figure out your age.

Ultimately, the important thing is: do your research, and apply for jobs where you are able to meet the qualifications. If you have 10 years of experience, look for jobs asking for people with 10 years of experience. Yes, some of your "competitors" for those jobs may be younger than you, but others may be older. People take many paths in life, and not everyone of the same age has the exact same job history.