Career Capital: Why Planning for the Long Term Pays Off

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. 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.

Considerations for career capital

Career capital is especially important in the earlier stages of your career

Career capital is particularly important early in your career for a couple of 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.

Think about what sort of career capital will be relevant (or essential) to your career path

If you plan on entering a competitive, niche, or complex field (say, in research or academia), it might be necessary to build up highly specialized career capital. This would likely look like investing in gaining credentials or building expertise through extensive years of study. The potential downside of specialized career capital is that it could make it challenging to change your career or field later on.

If you don’t know what direction or path you want to pursue, it can be helpful to gain transferable career capital. These can be skills or experiences that could be applied to several fields and opportunities—like management, interpersonal communication, project management, operations, connections to successful individuals, etc.

Consider the return on investment

Not all career capital is useful or worth the time it takes to build. Taking on a role that requires significant investment into developing your skill-set or financing your own education could yield promising long-term returns, but they’re not guaranteed. Further, gaining experience or career capital without a strategy could lead you to settle for a less impactful path. Make sure to do your research thoroughly (for example, using our career profiles) and think realistically about how the career capital you’re gaining will factor into your career progression over the long run.

Look out for unique or unusual opportunities

We can try to strategize and plan out the best possible career path, but oftentimes, a bit of uncertainty and serendipity can lend you an extremely valuable skill set or special knowledge.

For instance, maybe you’ll come across something that doesn’t necessarily seem impactful but that offers some unique and unusual experience that could be an asset. This could be something like spending an extended period of time in another culture, or working with a very high-profile individual. Even if it’s unclear how exactly these experiences will translate to your next job, these sorts of rare experiences could provide you with some extra insight that could be useful in several areas.

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.

Sustain your motivation to help others

If you spend a long time building career capital in a field or job that doesn’t help others (for the sake of making a positive impact later on), it’s important to find ways to commit to your values and sustain motivation. It’s easy to let our values drift over time, especially if we get stuck in the inertia of a career.

To reduce these chances, you could volunteer for a cause you find important, join a community that’s especially focused on helping others, or frequently engage with your plans to utilize your expertise to help others.

Overall, 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.