Guides
What Career Capital means
Career Capital is everything you have accumulated that a future employer can actually verify: the scope you have carried, what you can do, what you have been credentialled in, who knows your work, and what you are known for. It is deliberately not a personality assessment and not a measure of how good you are at your job. It is a measure of what the evidence would show someone deciding whether you are ready for a bigger role.
Why the seven areas are not equal
The seven areas are not equal, and they are not equal in the same way for everyone. Each destination weights them differently: an executive track leans heavily on leadership scope and network, while a specialist track leans on skills and credentials. Your score uses the weighting for the destination you chose.
Experience
Years in the field, the number and shape of roles you have held, and whether those roles carried enterprise or strategic scope rather than only local delivery.
What it doesn’t measure. It is not a seniority score. Twenty years in a narrow role evidences less here than twelve years across progressively broader ones.
Strengthening it
- Record achievements with a measurable outcome attached, not just responsibilities
- Make enterprise or cross-functional scope explicit where a role genuinely had it
- Add roles missing from your profile, including secondments and acting positions
Skills
How many distinct capabilities you can point to and how widely they spread across technical, commercial, leadership, domain and delivery categories.
What it doesn’t measure. It is not a proficiency test. We cannot verify how good you are at something, only that your career evidences you doing it.
Strengthening it
- Add commercial and leadership skills if your profile is weighted to technical ones
- Remove skills you would not want to be interviewed on
- Name capabilities the way your target role names them
Credentials
Degrees, postgraduate study, professional certifications, licences and executive programmes.
What it doesn’t measure. It is usually the lightest-weighted area, and deliberately so. For most senior destinations, another certificate moves your score far less than one piece of enterprise scope would.
Strengthening it
- Add credentials already held but missing from your profile. This is the most commonly under-filled area
- Consider executive education only where the benchmark cohort actually shows it
Leadership
Team size, budget ownership, commercial responsibility and strategic remit: the concrete markers of how much you have carried, not how well you carried it.
What it doesn’t measure. It is not about leadership style or capability. Someone leading brilliantly at small scope scores lower here than someone leading adequately at large scope, because this measures scope.
Strengthening it
- Add team size and budget figures to roles where you held them. Approximate is fine
- Take ownership of one initiative with measurable budget authority
- Seek a governance or steering-committee seat, which evidences enterprise remit
Network
The relationships you have logged across executive, recruiter, peer and governance categories: the ones that would actually surface an opportunity or vouch for you.
What it doesn’t measure. It is not a contact count and not your follower number. Two executives who know your work well evidence more than two hundred passive connections.
Strengthening it
- Log the relationships you already have. Most people under-record this badly
- Build two executive sponsor relationships outside your current reporting line
- Note the recruiters who genuinely know your track record
Reputation
Published work, conference talks, awards and media appearances: external signals that you are recognised outside the place that employs you.
What it doesn’t measure. It is not about self-promotion for its own sake. It matters because at senior levels, being known is often what turns a shortlist into an offer.
Strengthening it
- Record talks, articles and awards you have already given or received
- Speak once at an industry event in your domain
- Write publicly about a problem you have actually solved
Market
Role demand and skill scarcity for your destination: conditions outside your control that still affect how far your evidence carries.
What it doesn’t measure. Nothing yet. We do not have a data source for this, so it is left out of your score entirely rather than guessed at. It is shown so you know it exists and is not quietly padding your number.
Seeing your own
Once you have imported a CV and chosen a destination, each of these areas is scored against what that destination typically requires, with the evidence behind it and the evidence we could not find.
Still unsure about something? Ask us directly.