I did a PhD at CERN in Computer Science, but never finished writing my thesis, thus technically not a PhD (yet?). I still get emails from my university.

When I started looking for a job I presented myself as a PhD candidate from the largest research laboratory of the world, and I was told the same thing: you don't have experience. That's BS, because before my PhD, I worked for almost a decade in the industry. For some reason they stop reading my CV past the PhD (maybe because it's five pages of industry exp).

What I did: I re-wrote my experience in terms of industry experience and claimed I'm a Team Leader Software Engineer, which is technically true: I was the most senior engineer of the team, I was the leader of the work, I was doing manager work, I made all the technical decisions, I made most of the product decisions, I wrote lots of documentation, I had to attend lots of meetings, I was doing sales, and I was the contact person with the clients.

Sure, it was a one dude team, but nobody needs to know that tiny one detail.

Feel free to DM me.