Career Capital

Written October 29 2024

Est. 7-9 minute read

This article draws heavily from Probably Good (see their up-to-date entry here).

Career capital refers to the abilities and resources you accumulate—whether skills, credentials, connections, or savings—that allow you to do more with your career in the future. It’s an important consideration in long-term career planning, especially in the early stages of your career.

[3 servants receiving varying amounts of gold coins from their master in a green landscape to depict the parable of the talents]

Increasing future impact

It’s fairly obvious that going to university or gaining professional experience can help us reach our personal career goals, but people often don’t think about how these things can help us optimize for social impact. Similar to the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30), where servants are rewarded for wisely investing their resources, developing expertise and skills can lead to more effective contributions in the long run. Instead, those who want to do good often rush to make an immediate impact without taking into account the extent to which expertise, experience, influence, and resources can vastly increase the value they can provide to the causes and organizations they believe in.

In some cases, it makes sense to jump into a directly impactful career early on. Other times, particularly in the earlier stages of your career, it makes more sense to focus on gaining experience and skills that can increase your future impact. Because this approach can come at the expense of your immediate impact, whether or not you should prioritize career capital right now depends on your individual circumstances. Below, we’ll look at the four primary components.

Components of career capital

Skills

These are specific abilities you possess, such as knowledge of a programming language, familiarity with project management, or proficiency in marketing analytics. Acquiring and developing your skill set can have a major influence on what jobs you can land and how effectively you can carry them out.

Credentials

These can be any sort of externally verifiable evidence for your training, competence or achievements. This can include academic degree certifications, previous titles (especially in prestigious companies), awards, specific projects you can showcase, etc. Often your credentials can open doors to various opportunities, perhaps even more so than the direct skills they are meant to provide evidence for.

Connections 

These are the different types of interpersonal relationships you develop and maintain, within or outside of a professional context. Your connections can heavily influence what jobs you hear about, get recommended for, and your ability to exert influence in many positions.

Savings

There are important personal reasons to save money, but such savings can also allow you to take career paths you couldn’t have otherwise—most notably those that involve little financial compensation or high financial risk like extended higher education, starting your own company, or working in the nonprofit sector.

Why Career Capital Matters

Career capital is particularly important early in your career, for a few reasons:

  • Increasing long-term productivity: You’ll likely have decades of work ahead of you, so any improvements in your skills or resources will pay off over many years. Most people reach their peak productivity in the middle of their career, so investing in career capital early can set you up to achieve more during those high-impact years.

  • Small trade-offs in early career impact: Most people start their careers with relatively few specialized skills or influence, meaning that the direct impact you might forgo in your early years is often small compared to the larger contributions you could make later as a more experienced professional.

Flexible vs. Specialized Career Capital

When considering how to build career capital, it’s important to think about how flexible it is. Some types of career capital can be valuable across a wide range of fields. For example:

  • Flexible career capital might be a degree from a prestigious university, experience working at a well-known company, or training in a field like mathematics that’s in demand across many sectors.

  • Specialized career capital describes more highly targeted skills and knowledge, such as expertise in synthetic biology for pandemic preparedness. Specialized career capital can be incredibly valuable if you’re already committed to a particular cause or career path.

If you’re still unsure about the direction you want your career to take or which causes you want to work on, focusing on flexible career capital may be a safer bet. However, if you’re confident in your chosen path, investing in specialized skills and experience can give you a significant advantage in that area.

Career capital is an essential part of long-term career planning, especially if you aim to have a significant impact. Whether you should prioritize building it now depends on your current situation, but the earlier you start investing in your skills, credentials, connections, and savings, the more you’ll be able to contribute to solving important problems later on.

Summing Up

Career capital:

  • Refers to skills, credentials, connections, and savings that enhance future career opportunities and impact.

  • Is vital for optimising social impact, especially in early career.

  • Can increase long-term productivity and set the stage for more significant contributions later.

Need help discerning your career? Sign up for our free one-on-one impact mentorship here.

To read more about it click here.

Do you have any career uncertainties? Click here to read our article on three big career uncertainties you can trust God with.