When Meenakshi, an Indian woman living in the United States, posted a short video on Instagram about keeping her Indian work experience on her resume, she touched a nerve that resonates across millions of immigrant professionals worldwide. Her message was direct: the years of skill-building done in one country do not expire when you cross a border. The video has since drawn wide attention for its honesty at a moment when many skilled immigrants quietly erase significant portions of their professional lives to appear more palatable to foreign employers.
A Quiet Erasure Many Immigrants Know Well
The pressure to omit or downplay international work experience is a well-documented phenomenon among immigrant job seekers. It stems from a combination of employer bias, perceived credential gaps, and the assumption - sometimes stated openly by recruiters - that experience gained outside a destination country carries less weight. For professionals arriving from India, a country with a vast and technically rigorous workforce, this dismissal can be particularly jarring. Many Indian professionals have built careers in sectors such as information technology, engineering, finance, medicine, and education before relocating. Telling them their experience does not count is not merely discouraging - it is factually inaccurate and economically wasteful.
Meenakshi addressed this directly. "Your Indian experience doesn't count here in abroad. Does they tell you the same? But it does count," she said in the video. She confirmed that she never removed her Indian work history from her resume, her LinkedIn profile, or her personal narrative. She also disclosed her career gap openly, rather than concealing it - a choice that runs counter to the advice many immigrants receive from well-meaning but risk-averse career coaches.
Why the Instinct to Hide Experience Can Backfire
Removing years of work history from a resume creates its own set of problems. Unexplained time gaps invite suspicion. A profile that begins mid-career without context looks incomplete. Interviewers who probe chronologically will surface the omission anyway, often at the worst possible moment. Meenakshi's approach - showing her full story with confidence - sidesteps these traps entirely. It also gives employers an accurate picture of seniority, domain depth, and professional trajectory, which is ultimately what a resume exists to communicate.
There is also a more structural argument here. Skills such as software development, data analysis, project management, financial modelling, and clinical practice do not deactivate upon emigration. What may differ between markets is familiarity with local regulations, industry norms, or communication conventions - all of which are learnable, and none of which erase the underlying competence. Framing international experience as irrelevant conflates context-specific knowledge with fundamental capability, and those are not the same thing.
The Broader Cost of Discounting Immigrant Expertise
The instinct to discount foreign credentials and experience carries costs that extend beyond the individual. Economies that absorb large numbers of skilled immigrants and then systematically underplace them lose the productivity those workers could have contributed at the level for which they were trained. The phenomenon has a name in labour economics: credential underutilisation, sometimes called brain waste. It is not confined to any one destination country. It has been observed across North America, Western Europe, and Australia - wherever high-skilled immigration meets rigid credentialing systems or cultural hiring preferences.
For Indian professionals specifically, the challenge is compounded by the scale of emigration. India sends some of the largest cohorts of skilled workers abroad annually, across technology, healthcare, and academic sectors. The collective professional experience this population carries is substantial. When that experience is systematically discounted, both the individuals and their host economies are diminished.
What Meenakshi's Message Actually Asks of Professionals
Her closing line - "Different countries, same experience, same hard work, still valuable. Just trust yourself" - is not motivational filler. It carries a practical implication: that self-presentation matters, and that how professionals frame their own history shapes how others receive it. Confidence in one's background is not arrogance; it is accurate self-assessment. The caption of her post reinforced the point: "If someone made you feel like your past India experience doesn't matter… don't believe it. Your experience counts, every part of it."
That is not a radical claim. It is a reasonable correction to a widespread and harmful assumption. Immigrants who accept the premise that their prior career is worthless often start negotiating from a position of unnecessary disadvantage - accepting lower titles, lower pay, and longer proving periods than their actual experience warrants. Meenakshi's insistence on telling the full story, including the career gap, is a reminder that transparency, paired with confidence, tends to serve professionals better than strategic omission ever could.
