Your invisible merit badges

If you have worked for 15 years in a big company (like I have), you may have managed interesting projects, or been expert in some advanced technology in others. If that is the case, you probably would like to highlight that on your CV, when the tme comes to be prepared for changing jobs. Those are the merits which you want to show to prove that you are employable after all. But you may not be able to. Worst case, you can be fired for trying.
If the projects you have been running are high-profile, strategic, and company-internal, the fact that they existed at all may be a company secret. And anyway, just mentioning that you managed Project X may not be vary meaningful. How large was it, in time and money? How long time did it last? And most importantly, what was the result?
If you have been fired already and that is why you are polishing your CV, they can hardly fire you again for talking about it. Although getting sued is a real risk. But other people in the company, those who were involved in the project or who were responsible for approving it, may not be able to say anything. After all, they still have their jobs, and want to keep them.
So if you managed a really high-profile project and want to make sure it is visible on your CV, what do you do? If you are faced with redundancy right now, it is going to be tough. This is something you have to prepare in advance. Preferrably as part of the project planning, and then you have to be a bit clever about it.
The best way to do it is ito make sure your project has a public part which is visible to the outside world. This can be a university collaboration, a governement funded project, or something else which requires public visibility - like a product launch or a demonstration at a trade fair. As soon as the project result becomes visible, the risk for you and others who have been involved decreases drastically. After all, now you are supposed to present it.
Since you can not know what may happen in the future, it pays to be prepared, especially if you are working with things that are non-standard, that a recruiter may have problems tying back to something that fits into their frame of reference, then being able to reference something published externally definitely makes sense. In particular if you can point to a presentation at an event which in itself is a merit badge, like TED. Build it into all your projects.