A single employer for twenty or thirty years looks loyal to you and risky to a stranger reading your file in eight minutes. The fix is not to invent job-hopping. It is to show internal moves, expanding scope, and measurable outcomes as if they were separate chapters.
Structure that works in German hiring
Keep the Lebenslauf to two or three pages. Open with a short profile paragraph naming sector, languages, and the type of responsibility you want next. Then list roles reverse-chronologically — but split long employment into titled phases (team lead years, project years, specialist years) so the reader sees progression.
What to cut
Early apprenticeship detail can shrink to one line once you have decades of later work. Do not hide your age with missing dates; German recruiters notice gaps and invent stories. Prefer honesty plus strong results.
What to add
Numbers that survive outside your old company: cost saved, downtime reduced, apprentices trained, audits passed, customers retained. If your titles were local and opaque, add a plain-language equivalent in parentheses.
We use this rewrite pattern in almost every Late-Career Search Intensive because long tenure is common among clients over fifty — and it is still widely misunderstood.