Over the years of your career you accumulate abilities and resources to further your career journey. These resources are your career capital. This capital is made up of your job-specific skills, general skills, credentials, connections, character and savings.
The most obvious increase in career capital is by finishing education. Even if some people don’t look at it explicitly as a capital increase and more from the lens of societal expectations, almost everyone gets the gist of education: you develop skills and knowledge to be worth more in society.
Try to level up your career by taking on new professional responsibilities once in a while. This can be done in a totally different job, or as a change in tasks in your current job. Do this once you feel comfortable, and maybe even bored, with your current tasks.
Life experiences are an unnoticed way of increasing career capital. By surviving whatever life throws at you, you build character and empathy through understanding the situation of others. A doctor with life experience can help calm down a patient better than a freshly schooled one who hasn’t been in that situation before.
Developing a good character refers to the core values such as honesty, respect, trust and transparency, as well as derivatives such as humility, generosity, integrity and compassion. People like working together with strong and good characters. Having strong values creates a trusting work partnership, makes working with others easier, and ensures you do work that tries not to harm the planet.
Your savings define the amount of time you can live without income and work on building career capital. This runway gives you a deadline when your career has to lift off and bring money to the table. Whilst not a directly applicable resource to further your career, you can use this resource to get out of a stale situation and take some time off to increase other career capital resources.
The ability to sell yourself, to gain connections via networking and to close deals for projects is necessary to bring in money. You should strive to become better at these skills to further your career. Don’t start out with a hyperfocus on these skills. It is way easier to focus on building valuable skills first, and then present these skills to the world. You might even notice that by being great in valuable skills, you don’t even need to be a master of the sales and networking skills to obtain a sizable income.
Being patient is often an advice worth following, and this also applies to your career. Results will come eventually. It helps to soothe your nerves by looking up peak performance for your given career path. It is said that the average peak output for theoretical physicists and mathematicians is 30, for psychologists and chemists it is 40, and for writers, doctors, businessmen and politicians it is above 50.
If your goal is to quickly level up your career capital, work at an organisation with a reputation for high performance. Freshly out of school you probably don’t have the skills to work efficiently yet. Learn these skills in a rapidly growing organisation where there are plenty of opportunities for promotions and growing along with the business. A private sector business trains you in working efficiently by a selection of productivity that exists by virtue of being profit-focussed. Making an impact in a non-profit is often easier done after training up elsewhere.
Some folks end up fed up with their jobs (or have another reason) and switch to different jobs in a different industry, doing different tasks and requiring another set of skills. Such a job switch usually means your job-specific skills don’t contribute to your career capital anymore. Credentials are proof of others vetting your (usually job-specific) skills. Credentials can also include some sort of portfolio, such as a programmer’s code repository or a writer’s blog. While the skills might be irrelevant in your new career, the credentials will signify secondary attributes such as a level of intelligence or perseverance for obtaining the credential. General skills such as teamwork, management and leading capabilities can be of use in your new career path. The connections you’ve built up are only useful to a certain degree, as these people are still working in your previous and now unrelated industry.
Weigh the loss of your career capital when switching careers. If you think you’re going to switch careers often, try to focus more on building transferable general skills that you can apply in your future jobs. This way your career capital loss is minimised during a switch.