If Your Career Was A Business, Do You Have Capital?

In economics, capital consists of assets that can enhance one’s power to perform economically useful work.

When we hear the word Capital it is easily associated to Business or a term used for starting a business, but if you think of your Career as a business, do you have what it takes to perform useful work?

In Africa, especially Nigeria, your B.Sc is not enough capital if not everyone who graduates from any higher institution should automatically get a job. Capital is not an asset, it consists of “assets”, so you cannot rely on your first degree alone, not any more.

As a student, if you want to best position yourself for the future, you must develop Career Capital.
 

Career Capital is anything that puts you in a better position to make a difference in the future, including skills, connections and credentials.

It is possible you don’t even have full clarity of what you want do after school yet. I was like that when I graduated in 2014, but i know better now to share some useful insight.

Gaining Career Capital is highly important throughout ones career, but especially when you are a student because you have time to try out a lot of things and learn a lot from them.

Here are some of the best ways to gain Career Capital early enough:

1. Work or volunteer for any organization that has people of reputation for high performance e.g the big consulting firms or any consulting company. 

Consider whatever talent, strength or gift you have as a student, and try your hands on a lot of things with your gift. 

Volunteering your raw talent & strength in an organization as a student helps you get clear and will expose you to the relevant platforms where your talents and gifts can be refined.

For example, if you like to write, volunteer to write for any organization where whatever you write will be edited by more experienced writers and then you get to learn how to write better and grow your skills. Doing this early enough is actually the real gist.

Imagine you do this for four years, by the time you are graduating, you will realize that you have built enough career capital for yourself and cannot be unemployed.
 
2. Do anything that gives you valuable transferable skills like Marketing, Leadership, Management, etc.

Transferable skills are skills you need regardless your job role.

You can develop transferable skills with your School fellowship, Students Association. Just do it with a long term goal and purpose!

3. Embrace opportunities where you achieve impressive socially valuable things e.g. Start an organization as a student, Do BIG stuff and document them – they make up for an attractive CV.
 
I tell you, some of the things you will do, you may fail in them, but failing as a student is a Career Capital that shows you how to do things better before you graduate.
 
What we call attractive content on your CV are THINGS YOU HAVE DONE.

Think of the things you can do NOW and start DOING them. Remember to document what you did, how you did it and the result you achieved from what you did. 

That’s your Career Capital – It is your selling point in the future.

I hope this helps?

What are the BIG THINGS you will like to do from today?