When I reviewed “So Good they Can’t Ignore You” by Cal Newport I highlighted how valuable I thought his “Career Capital” theory was. I’d like to go a bit more in depth on it and talk about other types of capital that are useful in building towards the career you want.

What is career capital theory?

In the book, Newport talks about three traits that great jobs have in common:

• Creativity (opportunities to do, learn and create new things)
• Impact (doing something that you feel makes a difference)
• Control (being in charge of what you do and how you do it — I prefer to call this “Autonomy”)

Although it goes unsaid in Newport’s list, a good job also pays the bills.

Obviously jobs that have those four traits (I’m adding money as one) are in high demand, so the competition to get them is fierce. And like anything in a capitalist society, you need to be able to trade something to get them.

Newport makes the case that what you trade are rare and valuable skills, but I would like to expand Newport’s definition a bit. Your career capital includes all your skills, knowledge and experience. I think this is implicit in Newport’s theory, but I want to make it explicit: you can always be building career capital of varying value if you’re aware of it.

A specific role, for a certain amount of time, has a value. A specific project completed or product learned has value. A piece of knowledge gained or a certificate earned has value.

Let’s assume we’re looking at a resume. Which of these entries would make you most consider hiring the applicant:

• They have their CISA
• They have spent two years as a Jr Cyber Security Analyst
• They are the primary administrator for an XDR solution
• They are working on their degree in cybersecurity (expecting to graduate in one year)
• They were in charge of quarterly tabletop exercises for their last organization

Which entry matters the most depends on the role they’re trying to fill. If they’re trying to get a job as a pentester … well, none of them are super applicable for that. But if they’re trying to get a job as a consultant or auditor they’ve got a pretty good start.

This leads us to our first Career Capital Caveat^TM. Career capital isn’t like monetary capital — it doesn’t have a universal value. Career capital is highly specific. An extremely valuable piece of capital in one field can be worthless in another (if you want a job as a dental hygienist, an advanced knowledge of Python isn’t going to get you far).

The second Career Capital Caveat is that career capital isn’t the only kind of capital you need to grow your career.

It’s not what you know …

Of the eight full-time jobs I’ve had that required an interview of some kind, I had some kind of personal connection to five of them. This varied from a very slight connections (my ex-girlfriend’s dad was a customer at a shop I interviewed for) to pretty strong connections (a good friendship with the hiring manager).

But four of the jobs I got with no connection at all. So the old adage “It’s not what you know, but who” isn’t always accurate, but it really does help to have some kind of connection.

This brings us to our next kind of capital — social capital. That term can mean a lot of things, but we’re going to define social capital as being a combination of two things:

1. The number of people you have a connection to
2. Their impression of you

I do see a lot of people on LinkedIn connecting to everyone they can with a fairly generic message. That increases number 1, but it doesn’t really leave a good impression.

Other people may be well liked at their current job, but if they don’t know anyone outside of the walls of that organization they may have a hard time getting another position when they want to move on.

It takes both pieces to really build social capital — you need to connect with people, and their impression of you needs to be positive.

Much like with Career Capital, Social Capital is situational. If your rugby club loves you, but they are all theoretical physicists, they won’t be super helpful in getting you into a career in cyber security. Although maybe you should just accept the signs and get into Theoretical Physics.

In addition to building career capital during the course of your work, you should also be building social capital. Some of that happens naturally within your organization, and some requires stepping outside your comfort zone.

Personally, building social capital is much harder for me. A big reason for that is because I just don’t like the idea of it. It feels so … transactional. I don’t like “networking” as an activity because it seems disingenuous.

Putting together the pieces

To build towards the career you want you need “Career Capital” — skills, knowledge and experiences, and you need “Social Capital” — meaningful connections with other people.

That’s not all, though. Both career capital and social capital are situational. Before you can even begin building them you need to have an idea of:

1. Where you ultimately want your career to go
2. What major stepping stones for your ultimate goal are
3. What career and social capital is helpful in getting you to those stepping stones

Only when you know those things can you even plot out how you’re going to build career and social capital to get you where you want to go. So that’s what we’ll talk about next time.