How Hiring Systems Reproduce Geographic Hierarchies of Expertise

I keep finding myself in the same strange conversation.

On paper, I am a researcher with a PhD. Years of modeling rivers that refuse to behave, climate scenarios that refuse to agree with one another, and policy frameworks that only work if politics briefly steps aside. In life, I am someone who worked on environmental and water issues long before academia gave me a title, back in Syria, in contexts where “field experience” wasn’t a line in a CV but a daily condition of survival.

And yet, as I navigate job opportunities across different markets and countries, a familiar verdict arrives with polite smiles: insufficient field experience. Or its cousin: strong profile, but more suitable for a junior role.

It is a curious kind of erasure.

Somewhere between the bullet points of my CV and the expectations of HR departments, my experience becomes invisible. The years spent navigating fragile institutions, degraded data, political sensitivities, and very real water scarcity are flattened into something abstract. Modeling is seen as theoretical. Research is treated as sterile. Syria, it seems, exists more as a headline than as a place where professionals actually work, design, negotiate, and adapt.

This invisibility is not accidental.

Hiring systems rarely say that experience from certain places matters more than others, yet they often operate as if it does. Terms like field experience or hands-on work appear neutral, but their interpretation is not. Experience gained in the "Global North" or through :Global North–led projects: is typically treated as transferable and credible, while experience gained in conflict-affected or politically marginal contexts must be repeatedly translated, justified, and validated.

The hierarchy works through proxies rather than rules. Institutional affiliations signal legitimacy. Funding logos imply rigor. Short missions and formally documented field visits are easier to recognize than long-term work carried out under scarcity, informality, and consequence. What hiring systems can easily read is not necessarily what was most demanding, but what fits standardized narratives of professional development.

Because these hierarchies are rarely named, they persist quietly. Some professionals are asked to repeatedly translate and justify their experience, while others are allowed to treat theirs as self-evident. Until hiring systems learn to read crisis-shaped practice as expertise rather than exception, geographic hierarchies will continue to reproduce themselves—politely, efficiently, and without acknowledgment.

The irony is that much of what is now branded as “practical experience” in global projects (stakeholder engagement, working under uncertainty, adapting methods on the fly, dealing with imperfect data) was not optional where I come from. It was the job.

Still, I am told I need more.

More field missions.
More international stamps.
More time proving that what I already did counts.

So I am offered junior positions. Entry-level roles. Titles that quietly suggest I am still “becoming,” despite having already become many things out of necessity. I accept some of them. I consider others carefully. Pride is a luxury; sustainability, both financial and professional, is not.

This experience has forced me to reflect on how global labor markets value knowledge. There is a hierarchy that often goes unspoken: experience gained in certain geographies is considered transferable, while experience gained in others must be repeatedly translated, justified, and validated. A PhD can elevate you, but it can also trap you in a narrow definition of what expertise looks like.

I am learning to live inside this contradiction.

I am both overqualified and under-experienced.
Both senior and junior.
Both trusted with complex analysis and doubted on the ground.

What keeps me steady is the knowledge that experience does not vanish simply because it is not immediately recognized. Rivers do not forget the paths they carved under pressure. Neither do people.

For now, I navigate. I negotiate titles, contracts, expectations. I gather new forms of “acceptable” experience, even when they echo things I have already done in harder conditions. I keep writing, applying, and insisting (quietly, persistently) that lived expertise matters.

This is not a complaint. It is a record.

Of a system still learning how to read people whose careers were shaped by crisis, movement, and resilience. Of a researcher who refuses to shrink herself to fit a checkbox. Of a professional life unfolding not in a straight line, but like a river – sometimes diverted, sometimes constrained, but always moving forward.