Twenty-five years at the same company. That’s how long I’ve been at British Airways - a milestone that arrives next month, right in the middle of redundancy consultation.

When you’ve had that kind of tenure, you don’t spend much time selling yourself at interview. Promotions happen through internal processes. People know your work. Your reputation does the heavy lifting.

Which means that when you suddenly need to articulate your value to strangers, you discover muscles you haven’t used in decades.

The Box in the Attic

Somewhere in my house, there’s a box. Maybe several boxes. End-of-year performance reviews. Promotion interview prep. Project summaries I wrote at the time because someone told me I should. Evidence of work I’ve long forgotten doing.

I know this material exists because I’m the kind of person who keeps things. But I haven’t looked at most of it in years. And now that I need it, the prospect of excavating it feels overwhelming.

It’s not just the volume. It’s the format. Paper documents. Old Word files. Notes in systems that no longer exist. A career’s worth of artefacts scattered across storage boxes and backup drives, none of it structured, none of it searchable, none of it ready to become a compelling interview answer.

From STAR Coach to Something Bigger?

A few weeks ago, I built STAR Coach - a tool that helps you prepare behavioural interview answers by coaching you through your own experiences. It works. I’ve been using it for my own interview prep.

But STAR Coach is session-based. You work through a competency, you get your answer, you export it. The next time you open the tool, you’re starting fresh.

Last week, I struggled with a scenario question in an interview. I asked LinkedIn for feedback on what might help. A conversation with a contact surfaced two ideas:

A persistent vault for job-hunters - a place where STAR scenarios, job descriptions, background research on potential employers, and career artefacts all live together, connected, building over time.

A rehearsal tool - something that helps you get comfortable talking aloud about your achievements, not just writing them down.

This post is me thinking through the first idea. Not announcing I’m building it. Just exploring whether it’s worth building.

What Would a Career Vault Actually Contain?

Imagine a knowledge base structured like my research vaults, but focused on your working life:

Achievement notes - the raw material for STAR answers. What you did, what the impact was, who can verify it. Linked to competencies they demonstrate.

Role notes - not just job titles, but what you actually did in each position. The context that makes your achievements make sense.

Employer research - when you’re targeting specific companies, what you’ve learned about them. Values, challenges, recent news. Material for tailoring your pitch.

Interview prep - job descriptions you’re targeting, competencies extracted, answers developed. Connected to the achievements that support them.

Feedback and reviews - the artefacts from that box in the attic, digitised and connected to everything else.

Everything linked. Everything searchable. A career that compounds instead of fragments.

The Barriers I’m Already Seeing

Here’s where the product discovery gets honest. Three things are making me hesitate:

Privacy. Career information is sensitive. Performance reviews, salary details, honest assessments of past employers - this isn’t material most people want in the cloud. Any vault system needs to work locally, with no data leaving the user’s machine. That limits architecture choices significantly.

Ease of use. My research vaults run on Obsidian with Claude Code. That’s a technical setup - installing software, configuring skills, understanding markdown. Job seekers in the middle of redundancy stress don’t have bandwidth for technical friction. The excavation metaphor is apt: you need Indiana Jones, not an instruction manual for archaeological equipment.

Cost. AI-powered tools have API costs. My coaching tools absorb this because usage is light and focused. A persistent vault that you interact with repeatedly, over months, running research and synthesis operations - that’s a different cost profile. Who pays? How?

These aren’t fatal objections. But they’re real constraints that would shape what this becomes.

The Archaeology Metaphor

I keep coming back to the image of excavation. Career artefacts are buried - in boxes, in old files, in memory. They need to be uncovered, cleaned, connected, and made sense of.

An archaeologist doesn’t just dig things up. They establish context. This pottery shard means nothing until you know which layer it came from, what was found nearby, how it connects to what we already understand about the site.

Career archaeology works the same way. That project you led in 2018 means nothing until you connect it to the business context, the skills you demonstrated, the outcomes that resulted, the competencies it maps to.

The question is whether AI can be that archaeologist. Can it help you excavate artefacts, establish context, and surface connections you’d forgotten?

What I’m Actually Asking

I wrote a LinkedIn post asking whether this resonates. Whether a career vault would be helpful. What’s in other people’s boxes of artefacts.

I’m not asking for validation. I’m asking whether this is a problem beyond my specific situation.

Long tenure creates specific challenges. So does not having interviewed externally for years. So does being the kind of person who kept evidence but never organised it.

Is that common enough to build for? Or is this just my problem, dressed up as a product idea?

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This is product discovery, not a product announcement. If you’re navigating job search after long tenure, I’d genuinely like to hear what’s difficult - and what would actually help. Find me on LinkedIn or leave a comment.